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Wednesday, Jun 2, 2004 7:30 PM UTC

Smart mobs beat dumb CEOs

James Surowiecki's new book, "The Wisdom of Crowds," argues that diverse groups predict the future better than solo prima donnas.

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Smart mobs beat dumb CEOs

On April 17, 1961, more than a thousand Cuban-exile paramilitary fighters landed at the Bay of Pigs, off the southern coast of Cuba, in an audacious effort to convince the local population to join a march toward Havana and overthrow Fidel Castro. Instead of finding pliant locals, though, the exiles, who’d been trained and armed by the American Central Intelligence Agency, were quickly and ignominiously defeated by Castro’s forces.

CIA investigators would later determine that the agency’s invasion plans had been seriously misguided — the CIA had underestimated Castro’s popularity and the strength of his military, it had failed to lay down any real plans for the post-invasion period, and it mistakenly assumed that the U.S. could plausibly deny any involvement in the mission, even though the press had been reporting on the exiles’ training for months prior to the invasion.

Why did the Kennedy administration launch this flawed mission? Because it “planned and carried out its strategy without ever really talking to anyone who was skeptical of the prospects of success,” writes James Surowiecki in “The Wisdom of Crowds,” his intriguing new book that examines the ways in which groups of people can become either smarter or dumber than their brightest members. Surowiecki, who writes the financial column for the New Yorker, holds up Kennedy’s foreign policy team as an example of one of the perils of group deliberation. Specifically, the Kennedy White House was the victim of what psychologist Irving Janis, who studied the decision-making process that led to the Bay of Pigs invasion, called “groupthink” — a phenomenon that causes small, homogeneous groups to unconsciously squelch dissent and ignore positions that run contrary to the group’s point of view, leading to often bizarre decisions.

Groupthink seems to run rampant in the halls of government these days, and Surowiecki does a service to the nation in untangling the causes of this menace. But he points out that groups can be felled by much more than groupthink. In Surowiecki’s view, people form precarious collections; if we’re not organized just right, our groups can make terrible decisions. The intelligence of a team, or of a much larger crowd, can be diminished if its members are not intellectually diverse, if its members do not make decisions independently of each other, and if the team is either too centralized or too decentralized. The network of open-source programmers who maintain Linux is an example of a group that gets things right; the team of NASA engineers that managed the space shuttle Columbia’s last mission is one that got things disastrously wrong.

Surowiecki’s is a big-idea book, reminiscent of his New Yorker colleague Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” Although he spends much of the book pointing out all that can go wrong in a group or a crowd, Surowiecki’s big idea is that a well-designed group can be exceptionally intelligent, smarter even than its brightest member. Ask a crowd to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar and the average of their guesses will be almost exactly right. In the same way, people organized in markets, in betting pools, in corporations or even in governments can sometimes magically arrive at the correct solution to a tough problem.

In book form, Surowiecki’s writing sometimes meanders, and it lacks much of the elegance, and some of the delight, of his short pieces for the New Yorker. He also has a tendency to glut his arguments with apparently tangential examples, some of which raise more questions than they answer. Still, Surowiecki puts forward a compelling idea. In our world, we tend to think of intelligence as the province of individual “experts,” but Surowiecki convincingly argues that under the right circumstances, groups might be far better equipped to manage human affairs. In other words, this book should send corporate CEOs — the highest-paid experts in the land — running scared.

Surowiecki’s faith in the wisdom of crowds rests on what he calls “a mathematical truism.” If you ask a large group of diverse, independent people to predict or estimate something, when you average out their answers “the errors each of them makes … will cancel themselves out,” he writes. “Each person’s guess, you might say, has two components: information and error. Subtract the error and you’re left with the information.”

This simple fact can lead to remarkable results. Surowiecki points out, for instance, that within minutes of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, on Jan. 28, 1986, the stock market collectively determined which company to blame for the accident — and it got the right answer. While share prices of the four major contractors who’d worked on the shuttle declined after the accident, the stock of Morton Thiokol, the contractor that built the Challenger’s solid-fuel booster rockets, slipped the most. By the end of the trading day, the value of its shares had fallen by almost 12 percent, while the other three contractors had dropped by around 3 percent.

The shares of Morton Thiokol did not fall so precipitously because it had been publicly blamed for the accident, or because insiders at the firm were dumping stock; as Surowiecki notes, on the day of the explosion, there were no public comments indicating that Thiokol might bear some responsibility for what had happened, and even rumors concerning possible causes of the disaster did not implicate the company. Still, for some reason, the market chose Thiokol. And six months later, the commission investigating the disaster also blamed Thiokol. It was faulty O-ring seals on Thiokol’s booster rockets, the commission determined, that led to the Challenger’s demise.

How did the market correctly pick which firm to blame? Surowiecki concedes that it’s possible that someone in the market had inside knowledge of the defective O-rings. “But even if no one did, it’s plausible that once you aggregated all the bits of information about the explosion that all the traders in the market had in their heads that day, it added up to something close to the truth,” he writes.

Surowiecki is (understandably) captivated by this power of the market to aggregate different peoples’ ideas into a single “truth.” In business, as in much of the rest of life, predicting the future would be extremely valuable. Markets, Surowiecki says, can sometimes do an astonishingly good job of predicting which one of a number of different outcomes might come to pass. For some reason, though, many people, even businesspeople, shun markets; when we want to know what will happen in the future, we almost instinctively seek out experts rather than the crowd.

While corporations rely on the stock market to raise capital, Surowiecki points out that what’s done with that capital in most American businesses is often decided not by a market but instead by the whim of one “expert” — the CEO. And in the 1990s, these men were anointed as the superheroes of American business, pulling in obscenely large salaries and becoming cultural celebrities as a result of their supposed business prowess.

The problem was not just the hype, Surowiecki writes. “The problem was that people actually believed the hype, taking it for granted that putting the right individual at the top was the key to corporate success.” But this idea is deeply misguided. There is precious little evidence to indicate “that single individuals can consistently make superior forecasts or strategic decisions in the face of genuine uncertainty,” Surowiecki writes. Among academics, there is a debate over whether CEOs can make any dent on corporate performance, but even those who say that CEOs matter point out that their influence can be either positive or negative. For instance, two-thirds of all corporate mergers — almost always the brainchild of a lone CEO — fail. “This suggests that, at the very least, CEOs are not in general extraordinary decision makers,” Surowiecki writes.

Instead of having a CEO choose the company’s strategy, why not have employees participate in an internal market to set the course for a firm? Companies have been extremely reluctant to do this, Surowiecki says, but a few pilot projects in some firms indicate that the technique could be pretty handy. A test run by the economists Charles Plott and Kay-Yut Chen at Hewlett Packard gave a small group of employees the chance to buy and sell shares in a market meant to forecast long-term printer sales at the company. The market’s predictions outperformed the company’s forecasts 75 percent of the time. At Innocentive, a spinoff of the drug company Eli Lilly, employees used an experimental market to predict which three of six new drugs were likely to be approved by the FDA — and they picked the correct three, an extremely valuable trick in the high-stakes pharmaceutical world. Can a CEO who makes a hundred million dollars each year do that?

Surowiecki also has kind words for the Policy Analysis Market, the Defense Department project designed to use a market to predict threats in the Middle East. The project, which was roundly skewered as “offensive,” “harebrained” and “morally wrong” when it became public in the summer of 2003, was quickly abandoned by the government.

Surowiecki believes it was a bad idea to dump the DoD project. These days, the evidence abounds that the U.S. intelligence services have little insight into the Middle East. The problem is not just that we don’t know what’s going on in the region, but that what we think we know is sometimes way off. What the American public thought it knew about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities, for instance, seems now to have not been the product of actual intelligence-gathering efforts but instead the result of spin, hype, bureaucratic infighting, a less-than-aggressive press corps, and baldfaced lies. A decision market might have mitigated such problems.

“Since traders in a market have no incentive other than making the right predictions — that is, there are no bureaucratic or political factors influencing their decisions,” Surowiecki writes, “they are more likely to offer honest evaluations instead of tailoring their opinions to fit the political climate or satisfy institutional demands.” In the case of Iraq, those who knew about Saddam’s actual weapons capabilities, or who were at the very least skeptical of the Bush administration’s threats, might have anonymously bet against the government’s claims in the PAM market. The public would then have had reason to be skeptical of the White House’s claims.

It’s true, of course, that markets can also get things wrong, and Surowiecki doesn’t ignore this. Indeed, one of the most engaging sections of his book is an examination of what caused the breakdown of the stock market during the technology bubble. Surowiecki points to a number of reasons the market performed so badly during the boom, but his main point is that at some point in the late 1990s, players in the market lost their independence from one another. Fed by a constant diet of stock-boosting news on CNBC, investors became single-minded, as each person thoughtlessly did what he believed everyone else was doing — buying tech stocks. The result was a seemingly endless upward spiral in stock prices, followed, suddenly, by a seemingly endless downward spiral.

Alas, there are few real solutions to avoiding bubbles in financial markets, Surowiecki explains. If you’re stuck in a market in which prices keep rising for no reason, what are you going to do — get out? If you did that, you’d lose the chance to make a killing. But if you stayed in the market, you’d risk being caught up in the crash. All you can do is hold your breath and hope for the best.

Yet despite the spasms of irrationality into which markets sometimes sink, we’d probably be better off casting our lot with groups than with individuals. Yes, stock markets sometimes do dumb things, but most of the time they’re pretty smart. Individuals, on the other hands, sometimes do smart things. But it’s what they do most of the time that should worry us.

Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer and the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. More Farhad Manjoo.

Wednesday, Apr 4, 2012 11:45 AM UTC

States shush corporate critics

From factory farms to home foreclosures, state governments are helping hide corporate wrongdoing

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States shush corporate criticsWorkers at the Perdue Farms Inc. processing plant prepare cleaned and gutted chickens for packaging at the plant in Accomac, Va. (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)

You can’t be outraged by — or fight back against — what you don’t know. At least that seems to be the theory behind a spate of new government-backed efforts to help corporations prevent inconvenient information from ever reaching the public domain. In states across the country, as in Washington, D.C., lawmakers are helping companies keep secrets in everything from factory farming to fossil fuel exploration to home foreclosures.

In five states, for instance, so-called Ag Gag laws are now on the books. Iowa just passed legislation that “criminalizes investigative journalists and animal protection advocates who take entry-level jobs at factory farms in order to document the rampant food safety and animal welfare abuses within,” according to the Atlantic’s Cody Carlson.

The impetus for such laws is obvious: After a series of damning videos of factory farms abusing animals, Big Ag faced a consumer backlash. But rather than make its facilities more humane, it has opted to spend its cash on lobbyists and court cases aimed at preventing the public from ever seeing the atrocities in the first place. Accomplishing that means pioneering new legal theories that threaten to set dangerous new precedents curtailing some of the most basic First Amendment freedoms we take for granted.

Over in the world of energy, it’s much the same thing. Last month in Pennsylvania, the oil and gas industry successfully lobbied state legislators to ban physicians from telling patients what toxic fracking chemicals they may have been exposed to. As Mother Jones’ Kate Sheppard reports, “While companies must disclose the identity and amount of any chemicals used in fracking fluids to any health professional that requests that information … the new bill requires those health professionals to sign a confidentiality agreement stating that they will not disclose that information to anyone else — not even the person they’re trying to treat.”

At least doctors in Pennsylvania get to see some basic information about the industry’s toxic brew, which is more than health professionals in other states have been able to say in recent years. Indeed, in 2008, an emergency room nurse nearly died after being exposed to a company’s fracking chemicals and, according to High Country News, the company cited a trade secrets law in “refus(ing) to provide more specific information (about the chemicals) to the hospital once she fell ill.” That left her “intensive-care doctor to guess what to do as he tried to keep her alive.” This possibility still exists in states that still do not fully mandate disclosure of fracking chemicals.

In the housing sector, you probably assume you at least have a right to see relevant documents related to your imminent home foreclosure. After all, with that basic information, you might stand a chance of going to court and preventing a bank from illegally throwing you out of your home. Yet, if you live in Colorado, your assumption about being able to see such information would be wrong.

With details of the financial industry’s document shredding and robo-signing scandals still leaking out, the Denver Post reports that Republicans in the Legislature there voted down a bill simply “requiring that lenders prove their right to foreclose on a home.” That means Colorado remains the only state to “allow for a foreclosure without the lender first proving” it has the legal right to repossess a person’s domicile. With the GOP so successfully defeating the reform proposal in the face of public outrage at bank fraud, look for the financial industry to try to get state governments to set the same “no doc foreclosure” precedent all over the country.

Then there are corporate taxes, perhaps the most egregious area in which the government uses its power to shield politically significant information. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reports, “neither the SEC nor most state governments require corporations to release detailed information on their state corporate tax payments” — which deliberately makes it “hard to identify which corporations are not paying their fair share at the state level.” At the federal level, after corporate tax disclosure laws made it onto the books in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were removed. Bloomberg News notes that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has the power to “make the income-tax returns of all companies with shares traded on U.S. stock markets available to the public,” but that it has refused — even in the wake of reports proving that many of the most profitable corporations are now paying no tax at all in America’s loophole-ridden tax system. The result is that the government empowers corporate management to prevent both companies’ shareholder-owners and the public at large from ever evaluating a firm’s tax compliance — or lack thereof.

Each of these examples — and the many others like them — are closely related to the concurrent corporate efforts to prevent labeling mandates. And as disparate as such examples may seem, they each prove that 21st-century capitalism and old-school Orwellian control are not polar opposites, as they are often portrayed. On the contrary, those two political forces now often coexist in a symbiotic relationship — one that uses state power to keep politically charged information hidden. The theory beneath the calculation is simple: Public ignorance equals corporate bliss.

With protest movements rising and the possibility of widespread social unrest a real possibility, we should expect that calculation to be more prevalent in our politics than ever.

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David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

Monday, Dec 19, 2011 10:09 PM UTC

AT&T agrees to drop bid for T-Mobile

Government objections put an end to planned $39 billion acquisition

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — AT&T Inc. said Monday that it is ending its $39 billion bid to buy T-Mobile USA after facing fierce government objections.

The cellphone giant said that the actions of the government to block the deal do not change the challenges of the wireless phone industry, which it says requires more airwaves, known as spectrum, to expand.

The deal would have solved that problem for a time, and without it, “customers will be harmed and needed investment will be stifled,” AT&T said in a statement.

It called on the government to quickly approve its purchase of unused spectrum from Qualcomm Inc. and come up with legislation to meet the nation’s long-term needs.

AT&T, the nation’s second-largest wireless carrier behind Verizon Wireless, faces paying Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash and may have to enter into a roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom, while transferring it the rights to spectrum it doesn’t need for the rollout of its planned, next-generation “4G” network.

AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom of Germany would have made it the largest cellphone company in the U.S. T-Mobile is currently the fourth-largest.

The Justice Department sued to block the merger on Aug. 31, saying it would reduce competition and lead to higher prices.

Last month, the companies withdrew their application to the Federal Communications Commission after its chairman also opposed the deal.

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Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

I hired the wrong person and she turned on me

She's gone now, thank God, but I can't get her out of my head

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I hired the wrong person and she turned on me (Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Dear Cary,

Three years ago, I hired what I thought to be a talented, kind and honest second in command at the magazine where I work. It turns out, I was only one-third right. While “Sally” was great at many parts of her job, she wasn’t honest and she wasn’t nice. She began sleeping with another person in my department (my work equal), and was dishonest about it, and would often say, “The art department feels this would work better this way,” when our entire organization knew these people were a couple. She’d undermine me at meetings with higher-ups, criticizing my ideas and interrupting me, and in meetings with me one-on-one, she’d burst into tears at the slightest disagreement or say, with a stern little look, “We’ll just agree to disagree.” It made any sort of discussion darn near impossible.

She also puffed herself up constantly — “I was mistaken for a model yesterday!” and made digs at me and other people at work, “Well, that’s not MY taste. But, interesting!”

I was trying to figure out how to fire her when she took another, more lucrative job in another field. The guy at my office dumped her shortly before this happened. But sadly, even though it’s been a year, I’m still haunted by the experience. I feel like I let myself be steamrolled by an “All About Eve” clone, and I dread running into her at events in my relatively small professional circle.

I honestly believe she’s a pretty lousy person, and I wish her ill. But I check her Twitter feed, and, honestly, am a little obsessed with hating her. How can I move beyond this, or, better yet, make sure other people in my industry know she is evil?

The Bad Boss

Dear Bad Boss,

I know how hard these things can be. I am a champion grudge-carrier myself.

I could go into business carrying grudges. I could get a truck with a magnetic sign: No Grudge Too Small. Bulk Rates. Tired of carrying that grudge? Call 1-800-GRUDGE-KING.

Would it make you the most miserable man on earth, carrying all those grudges for others? Or would it be liberating, knowing that not one of them is yours?

Anyway, some of us are champion grudge-carriers and we need a way to let go of a grudge. If we don’t deal with it, it can last for years.

So what we do in the 12 steps, we do inventories. You could look that up. We work with a sponsor. We’ll say, I can’t stop thinking about this person who screwed me over. And the sponsor will say, Well, let’s do the steps on this. Or, have you done the steps on this? Or, what step are you on?

Doing the steps gets you focused on you, not the person you’re obsessing about.

In doing the steps, we write things down. We answer questions like, what happened, and who was involved, and what sort of injury or threat did we perceive? What area of life was affected? Was it our sex relations, our self-esteem, our status?

We just more or less dispassionately look at what happened. We break it down. We also ask what role we played. This is not done in a blaming way. We just, for instance, say, well, the role we played was, we made the decision to hire her. OK. The great part about that is it puts us in the mix and gives us a sense of agency. We’re not a victim, we’re a participant. We see, OK, we did have a decision and we did play a part. We might have made a different decision. Likewise with the other events, we just identify what part we played. It may be that all we did was choose to go to a party. But we realize then, though it may have seemed like we  had to do what we did, we see  that maybe we could have avoided the upset. Not that it’s our fault, but that we were present and played a part in it.

It reminds me a little bit of how one proceeds in cognitive therapy. What I like about cognitive therapy and the 12 steps is that they lead us increasingly toward reality. We are always asking what is real, what is concrete, what can we see?

Then we often find that our response had something to do with fear. We see that we were trying to prevent something from harming us.

As we continue in this way, dissecting the event, we begin to see that in an existential sense we can’t protect ourselves anyway. We are vulnerable. We may be disliked or disrespected by co-workers or family members. We may be cheated on or deceived. There are no guarantees. We cannot control other people. Meditating on this returns us to the real world; it restores a correct relationship to the awesome powers of life and death that surround us; it fills us with appropriate awe for nature and fate; it unites us with other creatures living and dead; it humbles us and returns us to the bosom of humanity.

This notion of letting go of control is a sticky one, because it involves beginning to trust in something outside ourselves, and often we have been adamantly self-sufficient. But to get out of our awful predicament we focus on something beyond ourselves. We place trust in something larger than us.

It’s not like we get converted or saved or ascend to a higher state of consciousness. It’s more subtle. We entertain the notion of something bigger than us, and it shifts our focus away from ourselves, away from our vexing, all-consuming fear. We see that the world is awesomely powerful and if it wanted to strike us down it would have done so already. So we relax a little. If it’s coming, it’s coming. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Once you entertain that notion that maybe you are not the one in control, then you do not need to respond to every possible threat with a flanking maneuver and a public relations campaign. Some things you can just let go of.

You are able to entertain the notion that maybe it’s not about the other person. Maybe it’s about you.

So you work with a sponsor and the sponsor suggests you do a fourth step, or a tenth step, or maybe the sponsor just talks with you about this obsession you have. But somehow you work through it by working through it. You have a method. That’s the point. The 12 steps offer a method, a simple, concrete method of purging ourselves of worry, doubt and fear.

If you’re not an alcoholic or drug addict and don’t have an eating disorder or a sex addiction you can always go to Al-Anon.

It’s just helpful to have a group. The Al-Anon group is all about how we deal with problems associated with other people — how the behavior of other people affects us, and how we learn to separate our problems from other people’s problems.

Really, I suggest you check out Al-Anon. You can get some grounding in the 12 steps, and you can hear personal stories from people who are coping with similar situations.

Plus it’s sort of fun. Really. Once you get over the initial novelty of it it becomes fun.

If you don’t want to do the steps, you can certainly get into therapy. I’m all for therapy. But therapy costs money and its efficacy depends on the intelligence and talent of the therapist. The 12 steps are pretty much free, and they work.

So that’s my approach to dealing with grudges.

But I still like the idea of the grudge-carrying truck.

I bet I could make some money.

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Cary Tennis

Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

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Thursday, Oct 20, 2011 3:36 PM UTC

Fox Business Network exec: Channel has too much Fox, not enough “business”

Rupert Murdoch's would-be CNBC-killer suffers in the ratings as it imitates its ultra-conservative sister network

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Fox Business Network exec: Channel has too much Fox, not enough (Credit: Salon)

In 2007, Rupert Murdoch started the Fox Business Network to crush CNBC using the same tactics that Fox News used to surpass CNN: Make a louder, sexier, angrier, more right-wing populist product, and the old people who watch TV during the day will tune in. Except it didn’t really work with Fox Business.

CNBC averages 263,000 viewers during the workday, according to Nielsen. Fox Business tops off at 85,000 from 4:30 to 8 p.m., and that period includes daily shows hosted by Fox stars Lou Dobbs and Neil Cavuto. Fox Business executive vice president Kevin Magee had a great idea to finally turn things around, according to a memo Reuters obtained: Maybe focus more on business news?

“I’ve been asked to remind you all again that they are separate channels and the more we make FBN look like FNC the more of a disservice we do to ourselves,” Magee said in the memo dated October 5, carrying the subject line “Fox News and Fox Business.”

“I understand the temptation to imitate our sibling network in hopes of imitating its success, but we cannot,” Magee went on to say in the memo. “If we give the audience a choice between FNC and the almost-FNC, they will choose FNC every time. Earnings, taxes, jobs etc give us PLENTY to chew on.”

As Media Matters ably documents here, Fox Business is right now just a sort of weird alternate-Fox News, with slightly different personalities who are still fixated on the exact same right-wing causes and phony outrages. (Plus cantankerous Connecticut cowboy Don Imus in the mornings, which is an odd choice for a “business” channel.) It’s Fox’s ESPN 2, except without extreme sports.

Why would an investor or trader want to watch Eric Bolling interview Pam Geller about the “ground zero mosque”? Who turns on a “business news” channel hoping to see former Wall Street Journal editorial writer David Asman promote birtherism and interview an ex-NFLer about the dangers of gay marriage?

The problem with Fox Business is baked right into the channel’s founding: It serves a market that is totally satisfied with preexisting offerings. People who want conservative-slanted market news all day already had a channel: CNBC. Just about everything Fox Business has ever done is either a retread (sexy ladies talk about stocks, just like on CNBC!) or just stupid (a five p.m. show set in a weird fake Irish pub!). While CNBC flatters its viewers’ senses of sophistication and superiority, Fox Business assumes its audience would rather watch an interview with Tila Tequila than hear about the SEC’s decision to charge Goldman Sachs with fraud.

The Fox model doesn’t work with business news, where the pro-corporatist mind-set is already baked into the majority of “objective” coverage and there isn’t a need to spice up the mundane business of promoting the interests of the wealthy with culture war material. Fox Business should be targeting the conservative elites who find Muslim-bashing and birtherism a bit distasteful (if necessary). But those elites may never find a reason to tune in. News Corp’s own Wall Street Journal has an exclusive deal with CNBC, and WSJ reporters are just as turned off by the Fox Business brand as everyone else.

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Friday, Oct 14, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

No, I can’t edit your manuscript for free

I write about books for a living, so people think I'd love to critique their prose

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No, I can't edit your manuscript for free (Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon)

Dear Cary,

I’m writing to you because you’re very nice and have a great deal of empathy, and I’m hoping you can tell me how to respond with empathy in a situation that’s causing me distress.

I write about books for a living. I have been working with, around and in books for over a decade. Hooray for my job; I feel very lucky. In the last six months, four people I know have approached me and asked for help with books they are writing. They want me to read and evaluate and edit their manuscripts. They want me to tell them where to send their manuscripts after I have made them publishable.

To which I say: No way! First of all, I have two jobs and am often so busy I feel breathless. Second, I write about books; I’m not a literary agent or an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house. I haven’t even published a book of my own (though I hope to, someday).

But, even if I had the knowledge they seek, why should I use it to benefit them? Reading and editing a manuscript would take a helluva long time. What’s more, it’s work, work that other people get paid for.

All these requests have come from men. None of these men are professional writers. I am not in regular contact with any of them; they are once-removed from my daily life: the brother of a friend, the husband of a friend, and  the father of a friend. They don’t ask how I am. They don’t stop to consider if I’m busy. They don’t seem to read my (published!) writing, since their manuscripts are in genres I don’t write about.

When I get these requests, I feel incredibly stingy. I get angry and anxious and think uncharitable thoughts about them.  It seems to me that they are all entitled jerks who have no respect for me or my career. Sure, they might think I can steer them on a path toward publication, but also seem to think I have nothing better than sit around and read their stupid manuscripts. They’re so out of line I can hardly think straight.

I blew off the first request. I flat-out refused the second two. I still haven’t responded to the fourth one, which I received this morning. This last request seems very problematic, since it comes from someone I’ve known since childhood and who’s sick.

So, Cary, what do I do? Am I right in refusing these people? If so, what’s the best way to tell them that I can’t do it? And how do channel some generosity of spirit toward them? How do I stop getting so upset? Right now, I feel like a mean-spirited jerk.

Sincerely,

Angry Books Writer

Dear Angry Books Writer,

You are absolutely right that such work is not to be expected casually or for free. It is very demanding work.

So here is what I suggest: Think of an hourly rate that would make you happy. Don’t think of the “correct” rate or the “going” rate. Think of a number that makes you smile. Think of a number that is high enough to discourage most casual requests.

This is what a person — whom I was paying to advise me — advised me to do when I received such requests. It seemed weird at first. I thought, well, I should just charge what is the correct rate. She said no, forget correct. How much do you want? What would make you happy? And what would discourage casual requests? You don’t really want to do this work all that much anyway, right? So, OK, a number came to me. It seemed high. It seemed almost silly it was so high. But it felt good to me! So I said it out loud. And the person advising me said, OK, when people ask you for this kind of work, quote that number. And I did.

I ended up accepting some work at that price. Surprisingly, I enjoyed doing the work. The person desiring my services was happy to pay that rate. Neither one of us felt cheated. We were both pleased.

It turns out that stuff is worth exactly what someone is willing to pay for it. It turns out — surprise, surprise! — that you can make an agreement with one individual based on what each of you wants and it will work out fine. Amazing.

That one piece of advice was worth all the money I paid this person for her advice, and more. It solved the problem. It made me happy. I’m grateful to the person who gave me that advice. And now I am giving that advice to you. It makes me happy to be able to give it to you. Really, it does. Because I have benefited greatly from it.

As to your desire to respond with empathy, how can you not have empathy for someone who wants to publish a manuscript? Poor bastard. How can you not have empathy for the person? That doesn’t mean you have to become their servant.

When somebody asks you if you would do this kind of work for them, tell the person that you do occasionally take on such projects, in a selective way, and here is your hourly rate. And see what happens.

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Cary Tennis

Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

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