Filthy Commerce

Why getting that MRS is no undergrad joke

Time magazine's "Are Marriage Statistics Divorced From Reality?" (May 24, 10) points out a few fascinating thing, but the one that stood out for me: "What seems most clear is that less-educated, lower-income couples split up more often than college grads and may be doing so in higher numbers than before."

When is it okay to judge how people spend their money?

Here's a fun little exercise in self-knowledge. Try reading "The Burden of Paying for Wedding Bells Shifts" (NYT, April 2, 10). Here are the interesting numbers:

The average American wedding costs more than $28,000, excluding major cities where the price is higher

In the past seven years, the percentage of maternal parents who foot the bill has halved to 10%. In that same period, the percentage of couples who paid for their own weddings rose from 27% to 33%.

And the story's anecdotes point to the costs being "spread around" with a wider pool of relatives picking up the costs.

How you find out more about yourself: What your responses are when you read through the story.

For example, on an intellectual level, I'm curious as to whether the rising percentage of couples wholly funding their wingding is at all linked to the rising ages of first-time spouses. I downloaded the U.S. Census Bureau's latest data on estimated median age at first marriage, and in the past seven years, the median age for men has risen from 27.1 to 28.1, while the median age for women has risen from 25.3 to 25.9. Is there a link between age and matrimonial funding? I don't know if anyone knows.

At the same time, on a purely knee-jerk level, I was thinking, What adult who's ready for marriage expects their parents to foot the bill? You want to make a public declaration of starting a new family, you prove it by underwriting the costs.

It took some conscious effort to reel back the judginess and remember that weddings have a lot of emotional and cultural factors. Parents may view the wedding as their obligation or their way of launching the new family. There may be pressure to throw a 400-person shindig, and it's hard to do that on a shoestring. And while it's easy to snort that $28,000 is a lot of money to toss on one day ... well, if you have the money, whose business is it how you choose to spend it?

That got me to thinking: When is it okay to be judge-y about how someone spends their cash? Is it ever? We send so many messages through our consumer activities; it's understandable that the line gets blurred between "It's none of my business" and "If you wanted to keep it to yourself, you wouldn't flash the cash."

Working at home won't always work

The shiny crown of workplace flexibility is working at home. It was the focus of some Presidential attention this week, it's the sexy "You can have it all!" solution dangled in countless career articles and commercials, it's the appeal of being able to tend to a sick child while also keeping the boss placated.

You know why working at home does not work for some people? I can think of a few reasons:

1. Some jobs require a physical presence in order to get done. Not every worker in America is a white-collar drone. Nearly 15 million work in retail, 5.5 million work in construction, 16 million work in manufacturing and non-durable goods, 19.4 million work in education and health services, 13 million work in leisure and hospitality. [Stats courtesy of the April 2, 10, BLS results] Show me the welder who can telecommute.

The invidiousness of gendered money skills

I just put up a Dollars & Sense post on ways to reduce food waste. It's basically a collection of small, free-to-cheap habits that will keep you from wasting money on stuff going liquid in the crisper or stale in the pantry.

In theory, we should have learned all this housekeeping-type stuff at our mothers' knees. In practice, however, I'd bet that a substantial percentage of us didn't. And it's sometimes hard to pick this up in adulthood -- especially if you're a guy and you're not running with a peer group that will casually mention these useful things. Women's service magazines and lifestyle pubs like Real Simple or Martha Stewart Living will run homekeeping articles that underline the positive financial side effects of knowing how to handle your pantry, but when was the last time you saw GQ run any article on food that wasn't along the lines of "Twenty-five things every debonair man must eat?" There is no analogous man-style body of lifestyle porn tying living well to living wisely within one's resources.

If the assumption is that men will always have a woman to sweat the small fiscal-domestic details, that assumption is dead wrong: unmarried men represent about 40% of all men in the U.S., and 43% of all U.S. adults are unmarried, period. To pretend that parts of your functional adult life can or should be farmed out to a household partner seems unrealistic.

Also: more men are doing the shopping these days ("Role Reversal: Mr. Mom Goes Shopping," ADWeek, July 1, 09), so surely the "How can I avoid the sad phenomenon of the liquid broccoli in my crisper?" query has drifted across their minds. You would think that someone, somewhere, would say, "I bet there's a market opportunity to connect these guys to this specific body of information."

A show like Good Eats fills some of the void, what with its combination of cooking-fu and handy, masculinized kitchen tips. But how else are men learning how to avoid the sad phenomenon of the liquid broccoli? Are they calling their moms? Trolling the Internet and hoping nobody notices their browser history includes Martha Stewart slideshows on optimizing one's fridge? I'm genuinely curious how they do it -- or if they do it at all.

Busy as you wanna be vs. busy as you gotta be

Do you know how you spend your time? Or why?

Oh good, another anticonsumption experiment

So Dave Holmes has the genius blog where he says he's reading one of those A-Year-Of-Stunt-Living books a week, then writing about the experience. And I cannot wait for him to get a hold of The Great American Apparel Diet, wherein a group of women have vowed to give up shopping for new clothing from September 2, 2009 to September 2, 2010.

Y'all, this will be hard for them:

Like most women we are attached to our wardrobes in some form or another.  In fact buying a new something-or-other is as natural as a dark choclate [sic] pick-me-up.  We all have our reasons for embarking on this project but it all gets down to this…who are we without something hip and new in our closets?  We shall see.

Speaking as someone who hoards the three-ounce Scharffenberger 82% extra dark chocolate bars in her fridge like they are priceless gems and I am Smaug the dragon ... my dark choclate [sic] pick-me-up costs me approximately $2 per each delicious, 190-calorie hit, or about $8 per typical week. I defy you to find me any well-made $2-$8 sartorial pick-me up.

Even assuming a 45-week run of pick-me-ups (because vacations and Christmas breaks will have their own consolations), that's only $360 bucks for 180 moments of sensory bliss. And I don't have to deal with clutter in the closet.

But I'm getting away from my points. You know I'm opposed to disposable fashion for both environmental and financial reasons, and it's not winning any points for human rights practices either. I'm for making changes to your personal consumption patterns in order to reconcile your private beliefs against your public commercial actions.

But I'm growing a little weary of the one-two punch where it's "Hey, I'm going to stop doing [presumed mainstream consumer activity] for a limited period and then blog about it!" Having that escape hatch means that you're not really committing to any change, you're just experimenting.

And I'm a little weary of people not realizing what a luxury it is to give something up voluntarily. There is a tremendous amount of privilege in a life where you can say, "I have too much, so let me see what it's like to live without." 

During Lent when I was growing up, my family would have one night a week where we ate a bowl of rice, and we'd donate what we would have spent on that meal to the local food bank. The reasons for this were twofold. First, my parents believed that "going without" was something we needed to experience in order to appreciate what we had. Second, they believed that you weren't supposed to profit from the experience but use it to help others.

I'd respect a lot more of these attempted-unconsumption efforts if they were just as adamant about addressing those who do without by necessity as they were in celebrating those who do without by choice.

Clearly, Oscar Wilde never comparison-shopped

"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." -- Oscar Wilde

Over on the Dollars and Sense blog, I've got a collection of links that will, presumably, help you become a better-informed shopper and make it easier for you to gauge the real and hidden costs behind every consumer good. This is a follow-up to the Morning Edition segment on Monday, "Capitalism Overload and 'The Value of Nothing'," with The Value of Nothing author Raj Patel.

While I was researching so-called "ethical shopper" links, I noticed something of a consumer-ethics monoculture: nearly all of these directories take the stance that animal testing is bad, corporate social responsibility is good, sweatshops are bad, eco-friendly manufacture and farming is good. Which is all well and good if you subscribe to those principles, but what if your priorities are different? Where are your resources?

From a political perspective, it is not terribly surprising that liberals have staked a claim on "ethical consumption," as one of the philosophical underpinnings is that companies do not have the right to pursue profit at all costs, and this spells "government regulation." It's also not surprising that so many of the guide contents focus on lifestyle purchases made with discretionary income -- it's a lot easier to feel good about purchasing a bed made by real American artisans (and I love my bed) and shrug, "Well, I have to buy gas." (Also, for the truly cynical among us: You can see how green a class of consumables has to be by how big their lobby is in Washington, no?)

I do wonder why it's so hard to find non-secular ethical shopping guides. For example, where is the Christian buying guide that emphasizes companies practicing responsible stewardship?

And from a practical perspective: the first real challenge to determining the "real" costs of everything is that cost will never reflect value, because value is variable and subjective. I can sit here in my office job and deplore the terrible conditions of a sweatshop, but there's probably some worker in Poland (where the sweater I'm wearing came from) who is like, "Dude, it was this or life as an exported sex slave."

The second real challenge is making the premise "Knowing the full impact of your consumption is the right thing to do" a majority value among consumers. Anyone who's got any ideas on how to sell this? Spill them below.

Why bother with the facts when you can have bribes?

This blog has been very helpful in extending my freelance career, and I am pretty much down with the part of the TwistImage post "The Part of Social Media That Freaks Out Freelance Writers" which enumerates all the ways in which blogs can be good for freelancers.

But here's the thing: The cost to being a content producer is dramatically lower than it used to be (you no longer have to own a newspaper to control public dialogue), and the cost of being a consumer is way down. Like, down to free. And the model as it is now is broken. Let's enumerate the ways:

1. Surprisingly, some people want to get paid for their work. Investigative reporting takes time and resources; not everyone can blithely jet hither and yon while their partner with the day job supports them. While giving away your work can be a great way to get a foot in the door (I wrote about television here for free before I ever did for here and here.), it is also a great way to send savvy businesspeople the lesson that rigorous, truthful reporting and intellectually honest criticism are a cheap commodities. Consider this: In the past decade, people are depending more on anonymous user reviews -- which folks are happy to write without any financial incentive.

2. When anyone can publish, anything gets published. This sounds wonderful -- until you need to know something and you're not sure who's telling the truth, who's got accurate information, who's not trying to deliberately misinform people because they have an ax to grind, who will stand behind their work.

There was a lot of snickering at Christopher Kimball's gauntlet-tossing -- a wiki recipe versus a Test Kitchen recipe -- but he's making a valid point: it's hard to find the signal amidst all the noise sometimes. In a way, this is the Wal-Mart'ing, self-checkout model of content: The burden of fact-checking, editing and informational synthesis has shifted from the writers and editors to the readers. You want your cheap content? Work for it.

To go in a tangent off the second point: I have been tremendously baffled by the outcry at the new FTC regulation for bloggers. Maybe this is because I have never been approached to try any consumer product, nor has any (obviously misinformed) company attempted to fling expensive baubles my way in an effort to curry my favor. Or maybe it's because I don't trust most blogs to have, much less be transparent about, their practices for avoiding conflict of interest when reviewing a product. (See also: Wal-Mart'ing of content production; niceties like editorial guidelines are no longer the responsibility of bloggers or their editors.)

When I read something like this:

Why just for bloggers? Do New York Times book, music, and movie reviewers disclose that they received review copies for free?

My answer is: Because bloggers tend not to have institutionally-enforceable conflict of interest policies. On the other hand, many established publications do; there is a framework in place to ensure that writers aren't easily bought. Heck, back when I was at Macworld, part of my job included boxing up and sending back all the hardware we tested. Giveaways were not allowed.

So what's my overarching point? It's that there's been a lot of blah-blah-blah about what so-called "old media" should learn from bloggers and content aggregation sites -- but I think the lessons go both ways. If you want the freedom to produce content unfettered from any umbrella institution, then take it upon yourself to assume the chores that institution used to do for you: keeping yourself transparent and accountable to the readers, and finding a way to make all that content pay.

A fine line between reporting and poverty porn

On the one hand, reading and seeing accounts of your fellow citizens in desperate straits can open your eyes to the societal problems which will, directly or indirectly, affect us all on some level.

On the other, there's the queasy feeling of exploitation and things tactfully left unsaid sometimes.

The photojournalistic essays "The White Family" and "Love Me" both focus on young people growing up in rural poverty; both painstakingly point out that poverty is an inherited disease for lots of people. And yesterday, the WaPo ran a story -- with photo gallery -- titled "For Many Americans, Nowhere to Go But Down."

That headline's misleading: the story focuses on one family, Scott and Kelly Nichols, and their slide into penury. The reason's pretty simple: Scott came down to northern Indiana to look for lucrative work, he had it for a few years, and because the RV industry was especially sensitive to the recession, Scott lost his work again. He is dead broke. He and the rest of his family will be moving into his mother-in-law's cat urine-soaked basement.

Buried in the story are little details that can be read as illuminating, salacious or censorious. For example:

Making families, making money

Last Sunday, all-around Web superstar Omar Gallaga had a story in the Austin American-Statesman, "Mom Bloggers Become Powerful Online Force," where he reported:

Mommy blogs have been around as long as there's been a blogosphere, but in the past few years they've become so numerous and influential that blogs like Hale's are becoming increasingly common. Some are also shifting to the kind of writing that attracts free products, trips or even book deals from companies who've embraced this powerful demographic of informed, connected women.

It's a great article that walks you through the forces pushing commercialization in the mom-blogosphere (the realization that women control most domestic spending in the U.S.) and the way firms have parlayed those factors into lucrative research and marketing opportunities (Nielsen Online's 50 Power Moms).

A few days later, Newsweek posted "Mommy Blog or Sellout?" The relevant section:

Today, there are thousands of self-described mom bloggers. A large subset work with marketers or companies, and in most cases, the items they review have grown beyond baby food and diaper bags. Some test-drive cars for months, are flown in for tours of company headquarters, or sent on lavish paid trips to places like Disney World. "Now there are these new set of mom bloggers, but they're really bloggers who happen to be moms," says Danielle Wiley, senior vice president for social media and consumer brands at Edelman, a PR firm. "They aren't really writing about juggling work and home and kids. These blogs are created to get products or to make money."

I don't really see a problem in writing a blog as a way to further your career. What do you think I'm doing here?

However, the story points out, when a writer is positioning their blog as the oh-so-real-and-warts-and-all saga of parenting and they mention that Gogurt is a lifesaver ... well, do you know that this is a solution the writer found on her own, or is she getting a kickback somewhere? That no acceptable standard for transparency has emerged yet just makes the picture murkier.

However, what I'm more interested in is the way that so many mothers are trying to commoditize what used to be called one's private life. Again -- nothing wrong with writing what you know or trying to make a buck off it. I'm just raising an eyebrow at the scope. If you look at the list of the 50 allegedly most influential mommy bloggers out there, there are 21 who specialize in consumer purchasing, 16 who specialize in "nesting" (decor and food) and two who write about juggling work with parenthood. The number of apparent influentials who write about local, state or national policies that affect parents? ZERO.

As Jill Lepore wrote in "Parents Magazine and the fuss about parenthood" (New Yorker, June 29, 09):

The changes of the past two centuries have created actual problems, structural problems that affect everyone, not just the demographic that reads Parents, problems that can be very hard to see when you’re driving while looking in a baby-view mirror. Most jobs are made for people who aren’t taking care of children. The sharper the division between parenthood and adulthood, the worse those jobs fit, and the less well people who aren’t rearing children understand the hardships of people who are. Employers are seldom asked to accommodate family life in any meaningful way; employees do all the accommodating, which mainly involves, especially for women, pretending that we don’t actually have families. Everyone has a story about how painful that is. It’s also crazy, and maddening, and unfair. We’ve all got stories to tell, but stories aren’t going to rewrite employment law.

(Emphasis mine.) I'm not surprised that a research firm which is trying to marry mommybloggers to commercial clients is heavy on the consumer products and light on the actual, societal implecations of parenthood. But what I am surprised by is what happened when I googled around for the Nielsen Power 50 and the commentary it should have sparked; nobody I found even noticed what was missing on the list.

I am not sure you can shop your way to a more family-friendly social policy. But there is apparently ample opportunity to profit from the status quo.

Alert Emily Litella: homogamous marriage is taking over America

One of my favorite conceits in Bill Willingham's Fables is that Cinderella's marriage ends badly and because she has neither family money nor a title to fall back on, she ends up a shoe shop owner/secret agent. Willingham's a noted conservative, but since he obviously has a great deal of affection for "Cindy," I suspect he's somewhat antipathic to the obstacles of social mobility in this day and age.

I am referring, of course, to the fact that it's a lot harder to "marry up" than it used to be. In February, Dalton Conley wrote in the WaPo:

The old story of the boss marrying the secretary (and her quitting her job) might have been fairly common back in the days of Ward and June Cleaver; today the manager is more likely to marry the manager. (In fact, doctors have the highest rate of occupational intermarriage of any profession, and they are all likely to keep working -- at least part time.)

"Women Have Come a Long Way. The Future Is Less Bright," Feb 13, 09

(Speaking as one media hack married to another, I can understand the allure of occupational intermarriage. In our house, love means never having to say, "Leave me alone, damn it! I'm on deadline!")

And then the NYT reported yesterday:

Some of the same social changes that have unsettled traditional 1950s-era marriages have seemingly deepened them in the 1990s and 2000s. Today women are contributing more financially to relationships than earlier generations, and men are contributing more to the domestic duties. Compared with earlier generations, men and women today are more likely to marry someone like themselves, with a similar educational background, experts say. The relationship is less about dividing economic and domestic duties and more about shared interests and mutual happiness.

-- "Marriage Stands Up for Itself"

I will happily fly into a frothing rage the moment any fictional narrative suggests that the best way for a heroine to make money is to marry it. However, the trend toward marital homogamy in the U.S.-- i.e. marrying someone of similar cultural, educational and income background -- has me thinking it's a good news/bad news scenario.

The good news: social scientists tend to believe that homogamous marriages tend to be longer-lasting, happier and less stressed than marriages where partners' backgrounds differ wildly. The bad news: these marriages make terrible sitcoms -- not that Dharma & Greg stands astride a mountain of martial sitcoms -- and they are contributing, however indirectly, to the widening income gaps between America's assorted socioeconomic classes. Some folks may not see this as a problem. I am of the opinion that a socioeconomically fluid society is about as close as you're going to get to a meritocracy under capitalism; it's also one in which all classes value the idea of social safety nets for the most vulnerable members of society.

I doubt the solution is to force marriages between the Joads and the Buchanans. But it is worth noting that a social institution ostensibly meant to stabilize a larger society might actually fracture it instead.

Pre-Pick-a-Fight Friday: Would fewer nonprofits really be such a bad thing?

A growing story in these, our recessionary times (TM): the predicaments not-for-profit organizations face.

The Nation sounded the first alarm with "Is the Economic Mess Going to Kill 100,000 Nonprofits?" on March 13, 09.

(SPOILER ALERT: The estimate comes from public policy professor Paul Light, who has been watching the downward trajectory of nonprofits for some time. I cannot find the basis for this estimate, which is mentioned once and then never spoken of again.)

ANYWAY ... the NYT picked up the predicament beat last Sunday with "As Detroit Struggles, Foundations Shift Missions." The nut of the story: since auto money is drying up, so are local grants -- right as more organizations find themselves being hit up to help the community. And the way some nonprofits and foundations are responding to hard time is by pooling their resources and working toward a common good.

Then today, the Gray Lady ran the results of a recent poll: "Financial Safety Net of Nonprofits Is Fraying, Survey Finds." By "fraying net," the article reports that only 12% of nonprofits will end their year with an operating surplus, compared to 40% the prior fiscal year.

In all three of the articles, there is the uncontested notion that any nonprofit shutting down is automatically a bad thing. Yet I wonder: Is this truly the case? Might the nonprofit sector benefit from the consolidation of like organizations, an emphasis on bottom-line results like the for-profit sector has, closer scrutiny over how effectively they're deploying resources?

So I throw it open to you: Would a shakeup of how the nonprofit sector operates be such a bad thing?

Social Capital #1: How to handle home sales parties

"Politeness and consideration for others is like investing pennies and getting dollars back."
-- Thomas Sowell

Welcome to Social Capital -- a column where I take your questions on the sticky collision between money and manners, and try to provide useful, real-world answers.

Q. I have a friend, "Joy," who is an incredibly nice person. I rarely get to see her, mostly through my own scheduling difficulties.  She has a home-based business that she started sometime in the previous year. I normally am a big supporter of my friend's businesses and local business in
general but this business is one of those "party" ones. She has emailed me asking for a "favor" and could I host a party for all my friends. This is the second time she's emailed me - I just ignored it the first time but I feel I have to respond now.

The thing is: I HATE THESE PARTIES. I hate going to them and I can't imagine hosting one. I feel like recruiting a friend to foist crap on their friends in the guise of a "party" is really tacky. I don't know a single friend who wouldn't hate me for inviting them to one of these. The idea of saying yes makes me feel flushed and queasy but I have no idea how to say no without basically also saying "I think this thing you're trying to do is lame and annoying and I won't ever do it" when, really, whatever she wants to do to make money is fine with me so long as I don't have to put out crudites for it.

Any advice or explicit email text I can crib?