Howzit Howard

Music Post: Five Frenchmen (and one Frenchwoman) who composed

People who write about the arts love to classify them (and to question the classifications made by those who came before them) and nearly always fail to organize the arts in any framework that holds. Somehow, though, these failures do gain more attention for worthy creative works. This is the case with Les Six, half a dozen twentysomething composers in Paris of the Roaring Twenties, some of whom might be forgotten were they not famously lumped together in a newspaper article. All six will be represented on my radio show this weekend. It started with another group of composers who were known as the Mighty Five, or the Mighty Handful. Rimsky-Korsakov, Moussorgsky, Borodin, Balakirev and Cui were friends who shared the idea of creating a Russian classical music that was not so beholden to German traditions. The first three are still regularly heard today. Balakirev was the spiritual leader and noodge of the group, while Cui, whose music doesn't sound all that Russian, gave them all covering fire as a music critic. In 1923, Parisian music critic Henri Collet saw a similarity between the Mighty Five and a group of six Parisian composers who hung out together and seemed to be rebelling against both Wagner and the so-called impressionist compositions of Debussy and Ravel. Collet found them more influenced by Eric Satie, because most of them were open-minded about writing music for light entertainment. The six were Honegger, Poulenc, and Milhaud, whose works are still routinely performed, and Georges Auric, Louis Durey and the lone female of the group, Germaine Tailleferre. The music of Poulenc and Milhaud, when heard today, still seems to fit what Collet wrote. Honegger's symphonies are quite dramatic, not light at all, but he was one of the first "serious" composers to write movie scores, so in that respect he does fit. Georges Auric wrote the theme to the original movie "Moulin Rouge." Durey and Tailleferre are remembered, if at all, but a few small piano pieces that aren't bad. Milhaud later made a big deal of the differences among the artistic sensibilities of the various Sixers, and technically he was right, but it's also true that the six were friends, they contributes works to joint productions on more than one occasion, and they even had a couple of reunions years later. Durey is sometimes said to have declined to attend one, but actually he was just out of town. Later, when he wasn't out of town, he would be there with the rest of them. I am a fan of Honegger's symphonies. If you think the more dissonant ones will be too much, try "Basil Delights" first. It is a delightful work. Honegger, of course, wrote "Pacific 2-3-1," describing a very large steam locomotive, but he also wrote some other tone poems you'll like. Poulenc's five keyboard concertos are enjoyable - I really like his organ concerto, and will play it is its entirety in the 5:30 a.m. half hour - and he wrote a lot of wonderful chamber music including a flute sonata I'd recommend to anyone. Milhaud was so prolific, I doubt if anyone has heard everything that has been recorded, but everything I've sampled is interesting, and in addition to his famous jazz-influenced "Creation du Monde," I really like his "Suite Provencale." Milhaud's favorite kind of dissonance was bitonal dissonance, in which different melody lines are played simultaneously in two different keys. Milhaud's students included Dave Brubeck.

Do you trust me too much?

Some recent questions from viewers have left me thinking that an excessive amount of faith is being placed in me to be all-knowing and all-wise. I'm nearly positive you've got the wrong guy. You probably noticed that when Tannya Joaquin took over our 5 p.m. newscast she began doing interactive stuff, inviting viewer comments on the news and reading some of them on the air. Not long after that, I began appearing on her newscast by webcam from home, allowing Tannya to ask me a question if a story makes her curious about something. Which is fine with me because Tannya is a friend from when we both worked for Brand X and if it weren't for Skype we've never see each other. But today, as an experiment I guess, Tannya relayed a question from a viewer, who wanted to know, apropos of nothing, what wireless provider I use. I am not much of a cell phone user. There is too much ambient noise outdoors to clearly hear a telephone conversation no matter how good the phone is, and I don't like to talk on the phone while driving. I would say four fifths of all my cell phone usage is calling Bernadette to say, "Okay, I'm heading home." Bernadette had a cell phone her mother gave her for Christmas one year. When the year was over and Bernadette was faced with taking over the payments, I suggested saving money by moving her over to my provider. That was Verizon, which I had chosen because Verizon is the local telephone company in Maryland where my mainland family lives. A few years ago, stuff like that mattered, ensuring my phone would work on vacations. These days even upstart Hawaii providers can give you service throughout the solar system through private labeling of another network. Since signing a cheap two-year contract I have not paid the slightest attention to what's out there that's cheaper. So anyone who takes my being with Verizon Wireless as an endorsement is making the inaccurate assumption that I know something they don't. At a recent speech, someone wanted to know what bank I use. Same situation. When I moved to Hawaii I chose First Hawaiian because my first wife's cousin Debbie, whom I dearly love, worked there. I have grown to respect and like many other First Hawaiian employees. But it hasn't kept Central Pacific from sponsoring my reports. And I'm on good terms with Al Landon of Bank of Hawaii and executives of American Savings Bank and other local institutions. I hold local bankers in generally high regard, and often advise people to rely on a local bank for financial advice because they knew you'll crucify them on the coconut wireless if they do you wrong. But I do not know "which is best," or if there is a best bank here. I do hear a lot of stories about people who love or hate a given bank because they did or didn't approve a loan when their business was new, but after years of hearing such stories no single bank emerges as a decisive saint or sinner. The idea of asking me for any investment advice is risky. I don't directly invest in stocks at all and never have, because I need the freedom to say whatever I want about local stocks. If owned stock in Maui Land & Pineapple, anything I said about the company from then on could be questioned, no matter how scrupulous I actually was about calling it as it was. So I don't. I drive a 2005 50th anniversary Thunderbird, and the first car I ever owned was a used Thunderbird, but that doesn't mean I endorse Thunderbirds. The first one was a lemon. The current one is a nice car, but who am I to say I wouldn't be happier with some other vehicle? I don't know nearly enough about cars to endorse one. The temptation is great to believe that there is someone who can guide you to a wise decision about things like this, and it would be really nice if this were true because you're busy trying to negotiate the rest of your life and don't have time to be your own Consumer Reports. I get that. But I'm in the same pickle as you. I work hard to tell you all I can learn about the stuff you care about, and don't want to spoil it by setting up unrealistic expectations. No oracle I, and no Ralph Nader, either.

As you spend less, retail vacancy creeps up

Mark Twain advised investing in real estate because "they're not making it any more," and land scarcity is a key value in making Hawaii's recession mild compared to the mainland. California's economy is tanking in part because its real estate markets - residential, retail, office and industrial - are plunging. The two main reasons are foreclosures - a foreclosure sale can slice a third off the price a home, and it's not so great for the next-door neighbor, either - and oversupply. Hawaii's economy has been milder in part because real estate prices have been falling more slower than prices on the mainland. We have fewer foreclosures - and most of the foreclosures we do have are on properties owned by offshore buyers - and we have a short apply of both homes and commercial properties. On the residential side, the resilience of prices has meant fewer options for first-time homebuyers, who can't always find the bargain basement price they want, but mortgage rates are so low as to take some of the sting out of that. On the commercial side, price resilience has meant that landlords are not so quick to cut some slack to good tenants. But this is not to say there isn't a little give in lease quotes. "Honolulu has yet to encounter the double digit vacancy rates and dramatic declines in rental rates that many mainland markets faced," Colliers Monroe Friedlander says in its newest retail market report. But it adds, "As the longest post-World War II recession continues, an erosion of current market conditions is anticipated." "Requests for rent relief from tenants are continuing to escalate," says CB Richard Ellis Hawaii in its own new report on the same market, "and net asking rents are being lowered as common area mainenance charges are rising, driven in large part by increases in real property tax rates and values, as well as recent increases in the cost of energy." CBRE puts Hawaii retail vacancy at 3.1% while Colliers Monroe Friedlander puts it at 3.23%. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that vacancy is between 3% and 4% on most islands but closer to 6% on Kauai. Mainland retail vacancy is way higher. Inside most economic metrics are multiple stories that carry their own numbers. In Hawaii right now, the big malls are mostly full, but vacancy is as much as 10% in a lot of strip malls. This is a result of the new consumer caution, shown by the national consumer savings rate rising from 0% two years ago to 7% now. As CBRE puts it, "This represents a new and definite shift in the psyche of the consumer from that of unrestrained purchasing to purchasing by necessity."

Hard to fill the cash register; easy to fill openings

You know the economy is booming when service in restaurants deteriorates. A few years ago, when Hawaii unemployment was sometimes the lowest in the nation, restauranteurs went nuts. They couldn't get enough wait-staff. "You have to be ready to go in and help on Saturday nights," one Kailua restaurant owner told me. "Because if one of your waiters has a date, and you tell them you can't spare them, they may just quit to make the date. They know they can get a job down the street the next day." A Kona restaurateur told me that some waiters don't even bother to come back for their final check because they get on so fast at another place. That was then, this is now. Unemployment is double what it was a year ago and still rising. And, sure enough, the entry-level job opening phenomenon has inverted. "The much higher unemployment levels have allowed retailers to begin to re-staff with a more highly qualified work force," says the new CB Richard Ellis Hawaii MarketView report. To the extent that better sales personnel can sell more, this could actually help cushion the bottom of the recession for local retailers and bring recovery a little sooner.

If the shoe fits, rejoice

Something unusual and wonderful happened this morning. Getting ready to go to work at 0-Dark-30 , I got out my regular shoes and they fit. For those of you just tuning in, something bit me in March while I was yacking with Pacific Century Fellows on the North Shore and the next day I was in the emergency room with a fever, making no sense. The left leg swelled up until all the skin broke and turned black and the fever persisted for days. Kaiser abandoned an attempt to treat it on an outpatient basis and hospitalized me for two weeks. The infection was vanquished by the end of those two weeks and the fever was gone, too, but I wasn't able to completely abandon a cane until June, and until this morning, despite elevating the leg whenever I slept, I couldn't fit it into a regular shoe. Moral of the story: If you should see a spider/ Move away, or hide her.

Is being unsafe a kama ' aina tradition?

Just before the Fourth of July, and just before New Year's, someone editorializes that it's time for us to ban personal pyrotechnics. But nothing's done, since we have a strong local tradition of sidewalk fireworks, despite the occasional loss of a finger. We get periodic calls to stop cockfights too. But, despite the occasional violence attendant to large amounts of money changing hands, we seem to have collectively accepted this as a local tradition that will find a way to continue. Traffic crackdowns like the cell phone ban and "Click It or Ticket" always spur somene to say, "Why don't they do something about tailgate riders?" Malihini say it, since it's not a common sight on the mainland. I usually see it on sedate roads and see the plump island girls in the back as a pleasant addition to the scenery. But the tragic death of a girl when a truck hit a concrete abutment reminds us of the danger of riding this way. It might be a little harder to preach a safety message to people who, when someone yells, "Shark!", run toward the water to see it; who surf; who parasail; who hold jobs with airlines. It's not recklessness, exactly; it's a familiarity with risk that leads one to think of it as part of life and no big deal. I'm not sure you can legislate safety and I'm quite sure you can't editorialize it. We can only hope everyone will make some effort to be careful.

What the layoff notices don ' t mean

The state budget crisis is a new experience for most of the key figures involved in it, including both Gov. Lingle and HGEA Executive Director Randy Perreira, and I think it's understandable that each would feel the strain of a situation in which there won't be any winners. A Republican governor in a Democratic state will be criticized no matter what she does. And Perreira can expect some rank-and-filers to greet whatever new contract there is with a lot of cheap talk about how a better deal should have been obtainable. There is plenty of pain to go around. And to make it worse, there is the chorus of citizens that responds to each new development with a fresh jeremiad about lazy bureaucrats. I have observed over the years that when someone loses his job, and people know it couldn't be helped, but they're upset anyhow, they persuade themselves they're upset merely because of the way it was handled. "I didn't mind losing my job," someone told me once. "But why did they have to leave me dangling all week and then tell me Friday afternoon? It's like they didn't trust me!" The same year, at the same company, the same manager, who had heard that and was chastened, told someone a week and a half early that their job would be cut for budget reasons. "I kind of knew I was going to be getting the chop," the employee told me. "I just wish they hadn't left me with a whole week left to work, knowing I was out the door." This past week, having warned that her fiscal responsibilities obliged her to prepare layoffs, Gov. Lingle decided to have managers tell affected employees before the weekend, rather than leaving them to read a list sent through the union. Perreira said the entire exercise was a negotiating tactic, but other people who criticized it sounded like my old colleagues, protesting that they found out in a phone call. Let's all take a deep breath. This is what the layoffs are about. No matter how you feel about furloughs, or wage concessions, or tax increases, or outright layoffs, no matter whether your sympathies are with labor or management, Republicans or Democrats, the state budget crisis is real, and something really has to be done. You can argue about the size of the gap, you can question the methodology, you can throw in some swipes at the Council on Revenues if you like, but the fact remains that the gap is, for sure, hundreds of millions of dollars, and this is after mining non-payroll parts of the budget for cost cuts in several rounds over the course of the past year or so. As indicated before, both the Republican governor and the Democratic legislature made spending cuts, even anticipating a greater shortfall than the Council on Revenues then predicted, only to have the year-to-year decline in tax revenues grow greater than the most draconian efforts to anticipate it. And Perreira, who watched this coming, made it clear early on that HGEA knew some sacrifice would be required. That was gutsy of him, even if state budget officials are understandably focused on the gap between what the unions so far propose and the actual savings needed to bring the budget to breakeven. Despite mutual recriminations about this and that, some of it perhaps justified, the fact is that labor and management are negotiating. But in the meantime, the governor can't just sit around watching the budget gap widen. So, announcing her intentions early on, she began working on layoff notices. Federal law requires 90 days warning of major layoffs. Every day Lingle delayed putting out layoff notices was a day later that the state could begin cutting jobs to control spending. If it was quick and dirty, it was because the calendar and exigencies of the crisis demanded it. The fact is that if we don't get a negotiated solution - wage cuts, furloughs or a combination of the two - in 90 days, the way the layoff notices are handled will be the least of our problems. And if the crisis is solved, these layoff notices won't mean anything. Still, in the meantime, let's cut a little slack for those who were on the layoff list. There are a lot of people who bear no personal responsibility whatever for this crisis who first had the experience of taxpayers flaming them, and now find their own bosses think that in a pinch they're expendable.

Diagnosing our health care ailments

A reasoned view of our nation's health care crisis is getting hard to come by as debate on what to do grows increasingly partisan. And that's too bad, because the problem will be hard enough to solve without that. This weekend, the issue went onto the front burner as both sides realized time was running out to pass a package in August as President Obama had desired. One thing that struck me that was the plan was being attacked as expensive. It is indeed expensive. But every plan proposed is expensive, and doing nothing has been expensive. That is the very definition of what the health care problem is. It's not that our health care is no good. It's that it's incredibly expensive, and growing more expensive all the time. The biggest single reason we're spending more on health care is something neither Democrats nor Republicans can do anything about: our population is growing, and our population is growing old. The children of the Baby Boom of the 1950s are approaching their sixties. World War II ended, our soldiers came home, married, and had children, with profound effects on America ever since. In 1968, when I entered high school in Anne Arundel County, Md., the big issue of the day after Vietnam, civil rights, and, "What's the matter with kids today?" was school overcrowding. Babyboomers like me had become teenagers and not even the opening of new schools could solve it. We had three overlapping shifts at my high school, with the second shift starting one class period after the first, and the third one two class periods after the second. School buses ran like shuttles. And classes were still extra full, with some subjects taught in "large group" classes in auditoriums. My classmates and I are in our fifties now. We were the school overcrowding problem of the 1960s and now we're the health care problem of today. Poster child: my first hospitalization was earlier this year. Until now I paid my Kaiser premiums but didn't consume a lot of services. Which brings me to the second biggest problem that health care faces. The business model for our health care system is that sick people who consume more services than they pay for are offset by healthy people who consume less than they pay for. Two trends have undermined this business model. The first is that some employers have sought to circumvent soaring health care premium costs by using more independent contractors who get their own medical insurance. Only many don't, and are uninsured. Reports on this part of the problem invariably focus on some uninsured person who gets really sick and is totally screwed. More often, what happens is that a young, healthy "independent contractor" gets away with having no medical coverage, but this fouls up the model. A pay-as-you-go model doesn't work because sick people can't. The second is simply that we're living longer, so more people are reaching that part of old age where one has a lot of expensive ailments. In the old days a lot of those people would have died already, felled by cancer or heart attack at a younger age. Nowadays many more people are living long enough to descend into a progressive collapse of all their systems. Okay, we didn't plan it that way, but that's the way it worked out, medicine is a victim of its own success, and we're not going to give back those extra years with our elders, so we have to figure out how to fund it. Now we get to some trickier factors. For years there has been an argument that tort reform to cap punitive damage awards would help curb health care costs. Doctors argue this because their malpractice insurance soared over the past generation as a result of some gigantic awards, which apparently bring up the cost of lots of other cases that are settled out of court. I have been told that this is a relative small factor in the overall increase of health care costs, but the other side says one mustn't forget to count all the extra tests that doctors order to cover their butts because they don't want your family suing them later if they can't save you. The likely solution to this part of the problem, already being implemented widely, is panels of doctors that have to sign off on certain procedures, so that one doctor can hide behind the collective wisdom of manner if the lawyers get hold of the situation later on. It's too soon to know if this will control costs, and whether it's good medically. Miracle drugs are incredibly expensive because of a policy decision years ago to let drug companies have a period of exclusivity of some years before their competitors could start making generic versions of drugs they developed. Some a new cancer drug costs a zillion dollars a pill for several years, then drops to a fraction of that when the exclusivity runs out and price competition kicks in. The thinking behind the system is that the exclusive years help drug companies recover their research costs. Before policymakers consider tinkering with this, they should forget for a moment the huge profits now made by most pharmaceutical companies, and consider instead whether any amount of encroachment on those profits will actually make a dent in health care costs. There is no point in antagonizing Big Pharma if trimming their profits won't actually help that much. And in any case the original idea did seem to work, since we do have a whole lot of new miracle drugs. Some health officials tell me the real problem with drugs now is not the cost of miracle drugs but the proclivity of doctors to prescribe too many drugs. When I was in the hospital there was a guy there who was getting so much narcotic pain medicine it seized up his intestines, which caused bloating, which replaced his surgical incision as the main cause of his pain, so he got more pain medicine, not to mention two other drugs to try to loosen his innards. My 90-year-old father feels better now than he did at 80 because his doctor took him off two drugs. My wife suffered liver and pancreas problems last year, not to mention excruciating pain, because a medical professional who was not a doctor told her to take over -the-counter anti-inflammatories for hip pain and keep it up after the pain went away. Several months later she was in the hospital. I could go on. You could, too, probably. But again, I don't know how much of the cost of health care is excess medicine. This is a medical issue but is it a financial one, and if so how big a factor is it? More later, perhaps.

Music Post: Mahler ' s Sixth, and Bruckner ' s

My favorite symphony is Mahler's Sixth. The strange thing about this is, not only would most classical music lovers would pick a symphony by somebody else - you know, Mozart's "Jupiter" or Beethoven's Ninth  - but most Mahler lovers would be surprised I like this particular Mahler best. Whatever. It's the Sixth for me. This week on my radio show I contrasted Mahler's Sixth with Bruckner's Sixth, concluding that Mahler has borrowed significantly from the Bruckner work even though none of the themes is even remotely similar. I'll get back to that in a moment. First, consider how different these guys were. Anton Bruckner was a second generation organist and teacher who did not compose symphonies until he was 40 and did not acquire fame until he was 60. Gustav Mahler was a rock star conductor who was dead before 60. Bruckner did some teaching in Vienna but almost no conducting. Mahler was music director of the Vienna Opera when that was the center of the musical universe, and, near the end of his life, was called across the ocean to shake a stick at the New York Philharmonic. He was the ur-Bernstein. Bruckner never married and seems to have been a bit of a social buffoon who had trouble getting girls to take him seriously. Mahler had a sexy wife who stepped out on him. Bruckner was a meat and potatoes man who liked his beer. Mahler was a vegetarian who would ignore the food at a party and ask if he could have a plate of apples. Bruckner was a simple man whose long symphonies involve enormous repetition, so that fans speak of the great architecture of his works while other people - thanks, Steve Martin - hail them as ponderous. Mahler's longest symphonies, well over an hour, still feel concise because there is so much going on in them. One thing the two had in common was that having written a symphony they could not leave it alone. Bruckner compulsively revised most of his symphonies in response to advice and criticism, to the point where more than a century later the academics can't agree on which versions of some works are most authentic. Mahler reversed the order of the Sixth Symphony's inner movements and then changed them back, wrote in three bits he called hammer strokes and then took one out, and removed one movement of the First Symphony altogether. But in truth Mahler was more likely to change other composers' symphonies than his own. He reorchestrated all four of Schumann's symphonies - I have a recording of his recomposed version; it's okay, but I prefer the original in the hands of a veteran composer who can navigate Schumann's own thick scoring - and he made many changes to the orchestration of Bruckner's Sixth before conducting it, which is why it's entirely plausible that was influenced by it. Bruckner never conceived a symphony that didn't have four movements in more or less the usual format - apart from the repetition and duration that I mentioned already, Bruckner preferred slower tempos and he modulated to a lot of different keys, as all composers who can play the organ tend to do. (Bach, Roy Harris, Paul Creston.) Mahler usually fiddled with the format. The Fifth and Seventh Symphonies have five movements, the First had five until he pulled one out, and the Tenth would have had five if he had lived to complete the scoring of it. The Second and Third Symphonies have vocal parts and the Eighth is as much a song cycle as a symphony. But the Sixth has four movements that hew surprisingly to the usual symphonic format for each one. He manages that despite the symphony's epic length - almost an hour and a half - enough time to tell an epic tale, and he does. Interesting thing: Bruckner's Sixth is one of his shortest symphonies, coming in at a little under an hour. Why, that's 10 minutes less than Beethoven's Ninth! A miniaturist! Mahler's Sixth and Bruckner's Sixth are both in A minor, and both make extensive use of a march tempo, powered not by drums but by a great sawing away of the basses. Thus, five or six decades before Minimalism, both of these extended play composers produced music with a pounding pulse. Interestingly, they chose similar tempos, which I would describe as a little too fast for a real life march unless the army is in a big great hurry. And both create a suspenseful mood, though Bruckner gave no indication of putting stories into his symphonies. Mahler always composed with non-musical ideas in his head, and told his wife that the soaring theme of the first movement represented her and the playful bits in the scherzo represented their children. If you hear the opening march of the Mahler and it sounds familiar, there was a TV commercial several years ago, for an airline or a rental car company, I think, which showed people at the airport in chains, and the Mahler was used as music track. The Bruckner hasn't been used in popular culture but the opening theme is a pre-echo of "Born Free."

Complex systems, chaos theory, and economic crisis

In academe it would take three tenured professors and a doctoral student to write a paper with a title like this, and it would be published by University of Southern North Dakota Press. Nonetheless, I promise to tie all three things together, and then some. If you read the original novel "Jurassic Park," you know that a great deal of it is about chaos theory, which, among other things, holds that even simple systems can grow quite complex, and as they do, they seem, even if they are not, ever more random. The practical relevance of chaos theory in the novel - and the movie, which I had expected to drop this story line altogether, actually encapsulated it fairly well in a monologue by Jeff Goldblum's character - is that Jurassic Park cannot long control the system of nature set up within it. Chaos ensues, in technicolor. In the book, "A New Kind of Science," Stephen Wolfram shows through one example after another (some books are hard to put down; this one is hard to pick up) how he can create elemental number programs and set them off, and a large number of them quickly become almost imaginably complicated. In this, as in "Jurassic Park," mathematicians would focus on other aspects of the increasing complexity of self-modifying systems, but what fascinates me is how quickly such systems outpace human intuition so we may not readily figure out where things are going. For me it is a mathematical demonstration of something experience teaches us about life, which is that large organizations and structures are too big to readily understand or control. Things often go horribly awry when done on a very large scale, because scale, at the practical level, is not merely size; it is also complexity. We are empire builders, we humans. No sooner have we founded a company than we dream of supersizing it. That's why there are more L&L drive-ins on the mainland than in Hawaii. We always like to grow our way out of our problems. Don't cut costs, raise more revenue. We threw out Jimmy Carter after one term once he turned dour on us and spoke of a national malaise. We like a president who believes in Manifest Destiny. I read a novel as a teenager that was set several decades in the future, and America had a number of new states including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and a couple of former nations in Africa. It was silly but it felt good in a way. Every few years, despite our hearty dislike of taxes, we get the itch to create a new cabinet department. Remember when we were told that Veterans Administration wasn't doing enough for veterans but if it was elevated to a cabinet department it would? The World Trade Center fell because we had so much accurate intelligence data coming in, we couldn't translate it in time, but instead of paring our bureaucracy or just hiring more translators, we folded a bunch of agencies into a new cabinet department. In retrospect it's quite amazing: we took all the people in all the existing agencies who should be working to prevent another 9/11, and tied them up creating a new bureaucracy. When U.S. railroads suffered a lengthy slump in the 1960s, and many of them went bankrupt, all the experts said they needed to merge to get economies of scale and abandon duplicative lines. The biggest merger was of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the nation's largest by track miles, and the New York Central Railway, second largest by the same measure. Their managers hated each other, their computers couldn't communicate with each other, top management got sidetracked by diversifying into other businesses, and the result was an immense collapse that took a generation to repair. Want more recent examples? Okay. Megabanks. General Motors. Nuff said. But not just bloated private sector enterprises. Everyone knows the federal government is too big. You may disagree with your neighbor over whether it's the military that should be downsized or everything else, but nobody thinks the federal government could serve us better if only it could expand. In politics, there seems to be a tendency to take a benign view of big government if you're a Democrat and a benign view of big corporations if you're a Republican. On the evidence of our economic crisis, and bearing chaos theory in mind, maybe both Democrats and Republicans are wrong. It seems to be that scale is the problem here. Whether it's the scale of regulatory law, or Wall Street financial institutions, of the federal government, or General Motors, of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or Countrywide Financial, of our own economy, or the global economy, everything has gotten so incredibly big and complex that an increasing number of experts have been quoted as saying they don't understand it. While I see no alternative to the federal government attempting to solve the situation, and while I think rules are good for businesses if they're plain and simple and fair, I think at every step of the way we need to consider the possibility that we're just restoring power to the electric fence after the T-Rex has already escaped the perimeter.