About not confusing length with depth

A brief meditation on: length in writing, which is to say word count.

As a writer I am intensely aware of word count, throughout the entire process, even while I am still conceptualizing my story idea. What would be the natural length of this idea? What new idea would I have to add, or how would I have to expand the idea, to justify more word count? Could I deliver the same idea in fewer words?

At The Economist we have a very inflexible page layout. For example:

A lead note, in our jargon, is the first piece in a section, and should just turn a page, but within a prescribed line count. = 1,100 words
A note, which is a regular piece in a section, = 600 or 700 words.
A column–such as Lexington (US), Charlemagne (Europe), Banyan (Asia), Bagehot (Britain), Face Value (Business), Economics Focus (Finance), or Obituary–is a few words short of 1,000.
A box, ie a short and quirky sidebar, = 300 or 500. And so on.

I have learned to like writing for prescribed word counts. It is great discipline.

For example: When I write Face Values, I write 990 words, then cut six words to leave my piece one line short. Why? Because that way an editor can’t take anything out without putting it back in! 😉 It’s also my way of winking at my editor, and they, tending to be cavaliers, usually get it and wink back.

Even in these sloppy blog posts, I always look at the word count, out of interest. Did you know that the average blog post, and possibly also the ideal blog post, is about 250 words? That’s just about what our boxes are at The Economist. My average is above that, but that is beside the point. The point is that….

Length matters

Take the New Yorker. My former boss, Bill Emmott, once said that its writers tend to:

confuse length with depth.

I heard Bill say this when he was leaving The Economist and giving farewell interviews, in which he was explaining what was special about The Economist. Brevity, for one thing.

Of course I know where that reaching for length on the part of writers comes from. All my students (when I taught at a Journalism School) always wanted to write long pieces. There is more kudos in it. You don’t get awards for 300-word pieces.

Well, that is a scandal. You should get awards for 300-word pieces, and even for shorter pieces. Haikus! Limericks! Sonnets!

(Editor: ‘Nice piece, William, but, you know, could you make it longer? William: ‘Er, OK. How ’bout: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, in the sweltering and sultry heat, just after a really, really big downpour….’)

Why do people never listen to what the great writers say? That same William in the sonnet joke, for instance, said, via Polonius (in Hamlet, II, 2), that

brevity is the soul of wit.

Or take Mark Twain, his American equivalent:

I’m sorry I didn’t have time to write you a shorter letter.

Or take Ed Carr, one of my editors, who once, 10 years ago, told me to

crucify your darlings,

by which he meant that I should write and then find the phrases in my writing that I was most proud of (!) and just … cut them! For the heck of it. To prove to myself that I can. To stay humble and nimble. That phrase was my screen saver for three years.

Seeing negative shape

Well cut

The skill in all the arts is to take away stuff, not to add stuff. When they asked Michelangelo once how he made such beautiful figures out of stupid blocks of marble, he said something like:

Easy. I visualize the figure inside, then I cut away the rest.

A lot of art goes wrong because the artist does not dare to do that. This is when a great and riveting Hollywood movie suddenly becomes unbearable — because instead of ending when it should, it goes on for another twenty minutes of moral summary and closure (in a courtroom, probably) just in case you didn’t get it.

Cutting into flesh

Michelangelo only cut marble fat, not marble flesh, of course. Over-cutting is just as bad as over-writing. This has also happened to me.

Sometimes, I write something that demands space and expansion, but then news happens and our layout changes at the last minute and an editor has to cut my piece to fit. This can go wrong. Perhaps the piece was subtly humorous or ironic, and now the tiny signals and implied winks are missing and it falls flat. Or a logical connector gets cut and the piece seems like a non sequitur. Or something went from being simplified to oversimplified and is just plain wrong.

Or a writer might simply have a great subject that, by nature, wants to go on and be told as a story but instead dies a premature death.

But I’ve observed that writers overwhelmingly err to one side: they overwrite; they rarely overcut. And they suffer more when an editor cuts than when an editor asks for more. Even though, to improve, they should always consider both options, simultaneously.

All of this is simply to say: Every story, every thought, every joke, every movie, every poem has a natural (=optimal) length. A lot of good writing is simply intuiting that length and then writing to it, and not one word more or less. Unless you want to wink at your editor and leave it one line short.

Free as Diogenes: a fantasy

One of my idols–and everybody has many and mutually contradictory idols–is Diogenes, the ancient Greek sage famous for living with no material possessions in a barrel.

I have to be careful about saying that because it might be misunderstood. Diogenes lived, quite deliberately, like a dog. Above, you see him with dogs. The Greek word for dog–like, kynikos (as in, via Latin, the English canine) is the root of our word cynical. Diogenes was a cynic in the original and pristine sense.

So, yes, Diogenes defecated in public, masturbated in the marketplace and generally displayed the same unapologetic honesty towards others as, well, dogs do. I don’t intend to do any of those things, you’ll be reassured to know. So….

What’s the point?

My point, and the point of original cynicism, is to live a life that is:

simple
virtuous
honest
free

And there you have them, my favorite themes, especially simplicity and freedom.

Put differently, Diogenes and his crowd reacted against the complexity and dross of human society, something that I have been criticizing especially in American life.

The goal, you might say, is no entanglements; no bullshit; no striving for success as defined by the consumer society or power politics, because all of that only causes … suffering.

And with that last word, you see the connection that I make between Diogenes and the Buddha, Patanjali and Laozi (all of whom lived very roughly during the same ‘axial age’). They all believed in radical uncluttering and simplification as a way out of human suffering and into a higher form of freedom.

And so I hereby include Diogenes in my list of the world’s greatest thinkers. He was really a …

Greek Buddha

Calling Diogenes a Greek Buddhist is funny, of course. The three Asians I am comparing him to above (and others have made the same connection) communicated their insight in an Asian way: They retreated to some banyan tree or rode off on some water buffalo, kept themselves very clean, remained resolutely gentle towards others and wore that perennial smile that we Westerners eventually find somewhat annoying. (We do, don’t we?)

The ancient Greeks, by contrast, were confrontational, in-your-face, bring-it-on types. That was as much part of their Hellenism as their great art and culture. And in that way, they are recognizably Western–ie, like us.

But I believe the message of the cynics was the same as that of the Buddhists, Yogis and Taoists. And Diogenes delivered that message without ever preaching it, by simply living the example.

Diogenes looked past the vain and venal veneer of ‘civilized’ people around him and sought honesty instead–he carried a lamp around (in the picture above) to symbolize his search.

To stay simple and free, he volunteered for blissful poverty because he only wanted what he needed and we humans, as it turns out, need almost nothing. He had a wooden bowl to drink but then saw a boy drinking with his cupped hands and realized that he did not even need his bowl; so he threw it away and was happier for it. When Alexander the Great came to him (Diogenes being something of a celebrity by this time) and granted him any favor, Diogenes replied: ‘Yes, please, step out of my sunlight.’ (Alexander, being great indeed, was not offended but impressed. The two great men would die in the same year.)

Sounding like Einstein, Diogenes once said that

Humans have complicated every simple gift of the gods.

When asked where he was from, Diogenes was also the first person ever to say

I am a citizen of the world (cosmopolites)

Cosmopolitan, eccentric, cynical (in the good way) and free: That was Diogenes. Wouldst that I had the same courage to bid all this crap in life adieu to live merrily in a barrel somewhere. Perhaps someday I will.

The violence of myth, the myth of violence

I am thinking about Cheri’s question: If children accept as natural the violence in the Greek myths and other old stories (Bible!), why do we adults reject it?

Part of the answer, I think, is in Steven Pinker’s talk, below. (It doesn’t show up in RSS readers.) It has to do with the stunning drop in violence in our human history. The ancients had violence all around them, so it entered their stories naturally. Even our great-grandparents still saw a lot more violence than we do, so they accepted it in their stories naturally. And we, as Pinker says, now have standards that have run ahead of actual behavior, so when we are being all grown-up and modern, we can’t deal with it anymore.

But the child within us ‘remembers’ the world of raw experience, before these standards. And, as Cheri has said, different people are childish to different degrees. The ‘child’ in my own personality is rather outsized, so perhaps that is why I connect to the old stories rather easily. (Emphatically not, however, to the vulgar and gratuitous violence in Hollywood).

Greek myths for 4-year-olds

My daughter parks her head in my arm pit, gets under her covers and is ready. In German, I begin:

So Zeus told Prometheus to re-people the earth with human beings, because all the mortals had died in the big war that he, Zeus, had fought and won against the Titans. So Prometheus made people out of clay. But they were cold and dumb. So he asked Zeus for some fire from Mount Olympus.

‘Sorry, that’s just for gods,’ said Zeus.

‘Ok, sorry,’ said Prometheus. Then he stole the fire when Zeus wasn’t looking and gave it to the new human beings, who suddenly warmed up, started cooking, started thinking and building huts and tools.

Zeus noticed and got angry.

So the humans started sacrificing their animals to the gods to appease them. But Prometheus, who was on the humans’ side and saw how hungry they were, said ‘Hey, do it this way: Put the bones and crap on one side and wrap it in fat. Put the meat on the other side and throw some fur on it so that it looks like leftovers. Then let the gods choose one of the two piles.’

The gods chose, and gods can be dumb, so they chose the bones wrapped in fat, and for once the humans had enough to eat.

But Zeus again noticed and now got really, really mad. He had Prometheus chained to a rock where an eagle ate his liver which then grew back at night so that the eagle could rip it out again the next day, and the next and the next. Wonderful.

How a 4-year-old hears this

Too gruesome for a 4-year old? Oh, no.

My daughter loves the Greek myths and insists on a few every night as part of her bedtime ritual. And not only does she get these stories at some simple, deep, archetypal level, she extracts very interesting and quite sophisticated insights about life. Such as:

4-year old: But Prometheus only meant well. He did something good. Didn’t the gods know that?

Dad: Oh yes, they knew that. But they were still angry, because they were vain.

4-year old: Gods can do whatever they like.

Dad: That’s right. And they’re a silly as people, and that’s how the Greeks explained all the stuff that happens in the world.

She got it. And I felt great. A few days ago, I talked to a child psychologist about this, and she said that children connect to myths and folk tales such as Hansel and Gretel so well precisely because those stories are archetypal, even and especially when they strike us as gruesome. We don’t give kids enough credit. It’s a mistake to tell them only sweet nonsense that amounts to a lie about life and eventually bores them. All within reason, of course. The child shows the way.

America seen from the Netherlands

At the end of this excellent piece by Russell Shorto, an American expat in Amsterdam, a Dutch author named Geert Mak says to him:

America is the land of the free. But I think we are freer.

Now, where have we heard this before? Oh, right, it’s how I started my ongoing ‘freedom lover’s critique of America‘, only I chose to say the same thing about Hong Kong vis-à-vis America.

Shorto does a very thoughtful and balanced job on some of the same themes I’ve covered in this series so far, including notions about inequality and healthcare. Compare, for example, the tenor of what I’ve been saying about oppressive American bureaucracy and what this American expat tells the author:

The amazing thing is that virtually every experience [here in the Netherlands] has been more pleasant than in the U.S. There you have the bureaucracy, the endless forms, the fear of malpractice suits. Here you just go in and see your doctor. It shows that it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Sick and unfree in America

In ancient Taoist China, a well-off family would hire a doctor, pay him as long as everybody in the family was healthy, and stop paying him as soon as somebody got sick until that person was healthy again. This, as far as I know, was the last time that a society aligned the incentives in the healthcare industry properly.

By contrast, healthcare today is upside down: You don’t pay for the thing you want (health); you pay for service when the thing that you don’t want (sickness) comes around. Hypothetically, if you had two doctors, one Taoist and one modern, and if the Taoist were good enough at his job to keep you healthy, the modern doctor would not get paid at all!

I bring this up only as a little thought exercise to illustrate something important: Healthcare is not like other industries. If the product is muesli or ball bearings, it makes sense to talk about competitive markets and such. But if you’re dealing with an industry that is fundamentally upside down, you have to be careful about using trite concepts of economics.

Another way that healthcare is different: If there were large numbers of, for example, children in society that could not get muesli or ball bearings, we could live with it. After all, they can get corn flakes instead, and walk instead of using wheels. The “market failure” would not equate to a shameful indignity. By contrast, if children (and adults, for that matter) cannot get access to healthcare, it is a shameful indignity.

(Disclaimer: As with everything on The Hannibal Blog, the opinions in this post are mine and mine alone, and may or may not overlap with the views of my magazine, The Economist.)

Healthcare and freedom

I bring up healthcare only reluctantly in my ongoing ‘Freedom Lover’s Critique of America’. I’m not qualified to talk about it and it’s not my beat at The Economist. But I decided that it belongs into this series because America’s healthcare system is so different from those in all comparable countries, and because it has such a direct bearing on freedom.

That the system is dysfunctional is well known. I won’t rehearse the familiar list of failings (many uninsured; many underinsured, et cetera). Let me just point to a few features for the subsequent discussion:

American healthcare is typically American in that is it bureaucratic and adversarial. The effect on patients is alienating and dehumanizing. At the precise moment when they are most vulnerable and dejected, they are expected to go to war against their insurance company on the 1-800 numbers and phone trees to contest pieces of paper they don’t understand. But they have to, because their insurance company will contest almost every single claim–for this is built into the system!
American healthcare is also typically American in being uneccessarily complex, as America’s tax system is. I’m not talking about the medical side–that is complex everywhere, because our bodies are–but about the administrative side.

Does this limit the freedom of individual Americans? Yes, and let me just give one concrete example. A free society is one in which people feel free to move and to change jobs, among other things. But a great many Americans are afraid to change or quit jobs, because their healthcare coverage is tied to an employer. So healthcare can become yet another of the shackles that makes serfs out of many Americans.

More generally, the system’s dysfunction limits freedom because it robs so many Americans of dignity. And dignity is a prerequisite for freedom. Thomas Jefferson could write “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” only because he lived in a relatively innocent age, the Enlightenment. A more mature constitution of liberty, such as West Germany’s after the Holocaust, begins with

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar–The dignity of each human being is untouchable.

So yes, healthcare belongs into any debate about whether a country can claim to be free or not. Now let’s figure out what sort of problem healthcare poses, in general and in America.

What kind of problem is healthcare?

When the ancient Chinese paid Taoist doctors to keep them healthy, healthcare was a cost of living, comparable to food and shelter. When we turned it around and paid doctors for managing our sickness, healthcare became an insurance problem.

And there are two traditions of modern insurance:

1) Lloyd’s of London

In 1688, rich toffs started hanging out in Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in London, near where the ships came in and maritime gossip spread. They began betting on which ships would make it to port with their cargo and which might sink. They called it ‘insurance’. It was really a higher form of gambling, with huge profits when the bets went well and huge losses when they went bad. This is the origin of the Anglo-Saxon view of insurance: as a profit-business.

2) Swiss mountain valleys

In Switzerland, going back to I-don’t-know-when, villagers got together to share risk. You might say they “collectivized” it, but don’t think that they were socialists. They were freely volunteering to pool their individual risks because they noticed something that we now call

the Law of Large Numbers

Say that a Swiss village had 1,000 houses. The villagers knew from historical record that, on average, one house would burn down every year. That house’s family would be devastated. Let’s put their loss at SF1,000 to make the math simple. The other families would suffer no loss at all, but they could not tolerate the indignity of letting one family suffer and lived in fear that they might themselves be next.

So they agreed, in free assembly, to pony up SF1 each for a SF1,000 fund. The SF1,000 then went to the one family whose house burnt down to make it whole.

What had they done? They had exchanged a

large but uncertain loss

for a

small but certain one.

They were able to do this thanks to the Law of Large Numbers, which says that an unpredictable risk becomes highly predictable when it is pooled with large numbers of similar, but unrelated, risks.

Caveats

The Law does not work if the individual risks are correlated. The Great Fire of London in 1666 (below) happened because all of London’s thatched houses stood so close together that they were in fact one big house from the point of view of a flame.

The Law also does not work if adverse selection spoils the risk pool. For instance, say that some of the Swiss villagers had opted out of the pool because they had stone houses. Only those families with highly flammable houses would have entered the pool, but that would mean that the 1-in-a-1,000 ratio no longer applied (it would be much higher).

The Law also does not work if moral hazard changes the way people behave once they get insurance. If some villagers get the idea that, since they are now “covered”, they might as well set their houses afire, the system breaks down.

Finally, the Law works best for risks that are high in frequency, low in devastation. Fire is a good example. It does not work well for risks that are low in frequency, high in devastation. An extinction-causing meteor is a good example. (Who would charge whom what premium for what risk?)

Back to healthcare

And where does healthcare fit in?

First, it is very high in frequency (everybody gets injured or sick sooner or later) and low in devastation (usually only that one life is at risk). For most illnesses–diabetes, heart disease, etc–actuaries know exactly what percentage of the population as a whole will get sick in a given year.
Moral hazard is not a problem, because–loonies and rock stars excepted–people do not intentionally ruin their health just because they are insured.
Adverse selection is a problem, because risk, and the perception of it, changes over a lifetime. The young feel immortal and would opt out to save the buck (Swiss Franc) for a beer, leaving only the geezers to pay up.

Conclusions

Healthcare seems to be altogether unsuitable for a Lloyd’s of London (Anglo-Saxon, profit-driven) insurance culture, and perfectly suited for a Swiss-mountain-valley (risk sharing) insurance culture.

The prerequisite is that everybody in the pool must participate to avoid adverse selection.This, however, would require a mandate for the majority to coerce a few unwilling individuals, and that is something that (real) liberals do not like. But many liberals (and the Swiss are freedom lovers!) make this sacrifice because they understand that it is necessary: Dignity mandates that we look after the sick even if they have opted out of participating, so some people would become free riders.

There are two simple ways to get everybody into one risk pool subject to the Law of Large Numbers:

Tax everybody a little bit (the equivalent of the SF1 per village family) to cover the proportion of people being sick every year, or
make people buy their own insurance, rather as we require car insurance for drivers.

The first leads to a British or Canadian-style single-payer system. (Important: Notice that the government need only manage the funding of the care, not the care itself.) Since everybody is covered, there need be no paperwork for patients. I still remember when I was visiting Britain as a teenager with a soccer team and woke up unable to move my neck one day. I dragged myself to the street, got a taxi to a hospital, and, although I was not British, got fantastic care without signing a single piece of paper.

The second leads to a system of competing insurance carriers. This is fine, although there is one problem: What if you pay premiums to one insurer while you’re young, but then you switch to another insurer when you’re old? That would be adverse selection again (for the second insurer). But in a competitive system, patients would move in both directions, and might cancel one another out. Even so, there is slightly more paperwork for patients, since the care provider needs to reclaim the money from any of several insurers.

Notice that, either way, the economic burden is the same: Every citizen pays, whether through taxes or premiums, the same amount to participate in the risk pool.

America

And now, the American way: A bit of everything, mixed together and stirred. If you’re a veteran, you participate in huge risk pool. If you’re old (Medicaid) or poor (Medicaid), you participate in other risk pools. If you buy your own insurance, you can carry your coverage around, but you are paying much higher premiums because the insurer assumes adverse selection. If you’re employed, your company arranges coverage, but only as long as you work for it. If you are none of the above, you have no coverage and go to the emergency room when you’re sick, thus leaving the provider to hike everybody else’s costs to compensate for you.

Paper, paper, paper. No law of large numbers for society as a whole. Fragmentation. Confrontation between patient and insurer. Nightmare.

And if Obama goes on to do just the “politically feasible” thing–which, in America, is to add more “options” and complexity–it will get worse.

The way to bring freedom and dignity to America is to get rid of employer-sponsored insurance and to have either one single government-run insurance pool or mandatory individual insurance for one privately-run insurance pool. Nothing else works.

Complexity in the American drawer

This is only tangentially related to my ongoing ‘Freedom Lover’s Critique of America‘; but tangent does mean touching in Latin, so this does touch the topic:

I am staying in a very American sort of place: The owner has gone out of his way to provide “conveniences”, and in America that usually involves screens–nowadays of the flat-panel variety. They must be in every room, so that you don’t ever have to miss out. Other devices must be connected to the screens so that you need not compromise on your entertainment options. You must, you see, have choice. (More on the paradoxical effect of choice on freedom here.)

And so I opened a drawer. It turned out to be the mother lode of complexity metaphors in American life. All you need to enter this American paradise was contained therein. I thought of the number of remote controls, then the number of buttons, then the number of permutations. But I’m not that good at math.

I savored the irony, then closed the drawer and opened a book.

Let’s contradict ourselves

I just got a short and witty reader letter (most aren’t!) in response to one of my pieces in the current issue of The Economist. It quotes Walt Whitman, and I love the quote. In fact, I am considering making it the motto of The Hannibal Blog and all its commenters.

Dear Sirs,

It was interesting to read about the Red and Blue and Purple and Orange of Kaleidofornia (“California Splitting”). Perhaps Walt Whitman said it best:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. “

Sincerely,
Rama Rao
Irvine , CA

Traveling again, but still planning to post…

… connectivity being the main variable.

Writers, lose your notebooks

No, I don’t mean that all of you should literally throw them away right now. In fact, I keep all of my notebooks, going back years, officially for libel-defense purposes but really out of superstition. But that’s not what this post is about. It’s really about the following anecdote.

I happen to live next door to Michael Lewis, an author of several bestsellers (Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, et cetera). He and I were walking down the hill once to get some lunch. We got to talking about the time that he came back from a big reporting trip for a book, only to discover …. that his notebook was gone!

“And it turned out….”, I began asking.

“Oh, much, much better,” he said.

And we both cracked up.

When my notebook lost me

Here is a brief description of my early years as a journalist, which is the experience that made me laugh at (ie, understand) Michael’s response.

When I started, I was so enthusiastic about observing every last detail and capturing every quote by everybody I met that I agonized over my note-taking. I could not write fast enough. In the evenings, I took a night course in shorthand (Teeline). I was the only guy; all the others seemed to be young ladies training to be secretaries (somebody should have told them that this wouldn’t prove so useful in their careers). But even that didn’t help. I never got fast enough.

So I had the quintessential writer’s predicament: Do you live, absorb, participate, think, see, hear, smell, act? Or do you stop life, and write it all down?

Recording interviews, with one of those little gadgets, didn’t help either. I didn’t like fiddling with them, and they usually intruded into the conversation, pointing at my interviewee like a dart that might be poisonous. Those things distracted me, and I threw them away.

Even so, I did capture quite a lot. I observe well, and I get “good quote” out of people. So, for a while, I was writing my articles quote to quote, detail to detail. Today, I believe that was the worst writing I have ever done.

At least close it

Around that time I heard John Micklethwait give somebody advice. The lady was having writer’s block, and John, the quintessential British cavalier, said, roughly:

“First, close your notebook. Then trust that it will come.”

(These days, John is The Economist‘s editor-in-chief–ie, my boss–so the trick must have worked for him. ;))

Relax and trust

Writing, and all storytelling, is necessarily a two-step process: 1) You live. 2) You pause, re-live and tell. You can’t merge the two artificially by writing everything down as it happens. If you try, you only interfere with Part 1).

Instead, good writers know how to relax. Only when the brain is relaxed does it make the lateral connections, the quirky associations that we call creativity. And only when you are relaxed can your interview partners relax as well.

Good writers then trust. They trust that ‘it’ comes back to them. And ‘it’ does. What is ‘it’? It is whatever comes back!

By the time it comes back, it is like water that has percolated through sediment and become pure and clean and potable. A writer’s memory is therefore like a filter, provided the writer lets it be that. What it filters is the entire overwhelming world of detail, so that only a few–the right ones–run onto the screen and become life-giving, texture-giving color.

Hannibal and Me: life lessons from history

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