Blog

Recently I attended my first Live in HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s das Rheingold. I’m not exactly a Ringhead, but I’ve always enjoyed the Ring Cycle, in particular because of its attention to the theme of how power corrupts people. This is, of course, one of the main themes of political narrative. Das Rheingold, to be sure, focuses almost exclusively on it.

The performance blew me away. I was impressed by the powerful sound, by the sustained close-ups of the soloists, and by Robert Lepage’s imaginative production. Because das Rheingold uses very little chorus close-ups of soloists work well. And the set was very effective at presenting events occurring at different spatial levels, as well as serving as a backdrop for projected images.

I came away from it thinking about the difference between witnessing a live production and witnessing a Live in HD broadcast. Tickets for live in HD are a lot less expensive and, at least for this production of this opera, it gives you a much closer view than any seat at a live performance. I don’t expect that Live in HD would cut into the Met’s sales, and indeed there are Live in HD presentations in New York City. (This differs from the standard practice in many sporting events of blacking out broadcasts within the immediate vicinity).

I wondered, however, if the Live in HD performances of the Met wouldn’t cut into the market for regional opera companies. I posed this question to my co-authors of Digital State at the Leading Edge, and received a detailed and thoughtful reply from Perri 6 that made 3 points. First, people go to live performances to interact with other members of the audience and for the interaction between performers and audience, the latter especially if the audience is small and the performance space intimate. Second, close-up may not be the best way of enjoying a performance. Third, while the sound in Live in HD is powerful, it is mixed and blended by the production team, and is likely different from the sound in different places in the hall. Someone may buy a particular seat in the hall because they prefer the sound as heard in that location. The general consensus of my colleagues was that the experiences are sufficiently different that the Met’s Live in HD will not kill regional opera.

The next Met Live in HD performance I’m going to is John Adams’s Nixon in China on February 12. It turns out that the Canadian Opera Company is doing 8 performances of Nixon in China between February 5 and 26 and the Met an encore performance on March 12. This serendipitous quirk of scheduling has provided what economists would call a natural experiment.

Contrast the two Nixons. For Live in HD you get close-up camera work and powerful, perhaps overpowering, sound. Let’s also give the edge in quality to the Met for the same reason the Yankees usually do better in the AL East than the Blue Jays. Tickets cost $25 and you see it in borderline-grubby Cineplex cinemas usually in shopping malls.

For the Canadian Opera Company you get the in-person experience that Perri raves about. You also get a chance to dress up and see and be seen, something that has always been part of opera-going. (My compliments to the ad agency that does Cialis commercials for one that cleverly refers to the performance before the performance.) Single tickets cost between $70 and $317, though I imagine there are less expensive package deals and youth discounts.

If we were considering the impact of Live in HD broadcasts on the COC’s live performances, there are a number of things we’d like to find out. How many tickets did each sell and how many seats were empty? The Live in HD broadcasts are presented in multiple screens in the greater Toronto area, so its two performances could still amount to quite a few seats.

I could imagine a questionnaire posed to the patrons of each. Were you aware that the other way of watching the opera was available? If you were aware, why did you choose this one? Are you seeing both the COC live and the Met’s Live in HD (to pick up the real hard-core John Adams fans)? In general, do you go to both COC live and the Met’s Live in HD? If you’ve ever been to both, what do you like about each and dislike about each?

Without proprietary information about the audience (held by the COC and Cineplex) a telephone survey wouldn’t be possible. I suppose the most feasible way to implement such a survey would be to distribute it at the door. That of course, would require some funding and some research assistants – dressed down at the cinema and dressed to the nines at the opera – to hand out the questionnaires.

With less than three months, it would likely be difficult to find funding. And that’s unfortunate, because I think these are fascinating and important questions about the relationship between traditional live performance and a new technologically-enabled alternative.

As part of the last chapter in my book about public management narratives, I developed a list of my top ten. They are not ranked, but rather listed in the order they appear in the book. My main criterion in evaluating these narratives is the extent of my engagement, in terms of enjoying the movie or novel the first time I encountered it as well as the intellectual stimulation that comes from ongoing reflection about it. Some are considered classics but others are, in my view, unfairly neglected.

1.Stand and Deliver

Jaime Escalante was an ordinary person whose charisma came from his extraordinary enthusiasm for what he was teaching and his commitment to his students. His teaching did not reward or encourage self-revelation, but it demanded mastery of abstract concepts and meeting externally-imposed standards. Stand and Deliver remains as the original transformational teacher narrative.

2.Cheaters

It succeeds both because of the cleverness with which it parodies the transformational teacher fable and because it poses the thought-provoking question of whether as competitive a society as the US subtly encourages those with high aspirations to cheat. It thus serves as a fitting introduction to a different genre, namely the many narratives about corruption in the corporate world.

3.The Class

The Class (Entre les Murs) challenges the transformational teacher fable by transposing it to a different culture and portraying a teacher who is well-meaning and energetic but who makes mistakes in classroom management that leave him on the verge of losing control. Could he have handled the situation more effectively? Producing the film through improvisation by an ensemble that includes the students provides a variety of perspectives about what happened in the class.

4.Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister

The rigor and cleverness of its application of public choice principles to a wide variety of public policy and management questions is unparalleled. It also encourages us to reflect on the ways language can be used in government to obscure or mislead. The two episodes of Yes Prime Minister discussed in chapter 3, “The Ministerial Broadcast” and “The Smokescreen” are a good starting

5.Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day

While the film adaptation is excellent, going back to the original novel is even better. Ishiguro’s creation of the butler Stevens’s unique voice and the slow revelation of an unsettled and anxiety-provoking story are masterful. The novel leads one to ask if there was not some way Stevens could have overcome the constraints of Darlington Hall to have made a more honest and more rewarding life for himself and, more broadly, to ask about how an agent should respond to a principal with whom he profoundly disagrees.

6.Advise and Consent

By downplaying the heavy-handed anti-communist perspective of Allen Drury, the author of the original novel, Otto Preminger’s film adaptation poses important questions of the legitimacy of the means to achieve political ends. Are character assassination, blackmail, and lying under oath ever justified? Preminger pushed the censorship envelope of the early Sixties by depicting a gay lifestyle (even though the story stigmatized homosexuality).

7.The Candidate

Jeremy Larner’s screenplay subtly portrays the process by which a politician, responding to the pressure of his handlers, the expectations of the voters, and opportunity created by his own gifts appears to lose his soul. Or does he? Also, by running what was in effect a political campaign, the film-makers crowd-sourced the movie decades before the concept of crowd-sourcing had been invented.

8.The Fog of War

Errol Morris’s sympathetic but probing questions lead Robert McNamara to overturn the received wisdom regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis and to relive the trauma of Vietnam. We come to understand the extraordinary arc of McNamara’s life story but the moral questions of wartime leadership remain unresolved. These questions emerge to the backdrop of a mesmerizing visual presentation and musical score.

9.The West Wing

It portrays a president who has a vision for the nation, who is a thoughtful and careful decision-maker, and who has established a culture in which his West Wing staff are not afraid to speak what they see as the truth to power. In addition, the series replicates the frenetic pace of the West Wing, with a continuing stream of crises and issues to be managed. Of its 154 episodes over seven seasons I recommend: Season 1, episode 9 (“The Short List”) about the choice of a nominee for the Supreme Court; Season 1, episode 14 (“Take this Sabbath Day”) about capital punishment; Season 1, episode 19 (“Let Bartlet be Bartlet”) about difficulty advancing the president’s agenda; Season 3, episode 8 (“The Women of Qumar”) about issues management and compromising one’s ideals; and Season 7, episode 7 (“The Debate”) which presents an intelligent and thoughtful debate between the Democratic and Republican nominees to succeed President Bartlet.

10.Twelve Angry Men

Rightly considered a classic play and movie, Twelve Angry Men builds its tension through heated deliberation in a claustrophobic jury room. While Juror Number 8 (the architect portrayed by Henry Fonda) heroically leads the jury to its verdict, the crime is not solved, inviting viewers to deliberate on their own about the guilt or innocence of the accused.

What do you think? Are there errors either of omission or commission?

Documentary film-maker Charles Ferguson is a bona fide scholar with a 1989 Ph D in Political Science from MIT and several books about the IT industry with respectable Google Scholar counts on his cv. He also cofounded a high-tech startup, Vermeer Technologies, which was sold to Microsoft in 1996 for $133 million.

He has in effect endowed the Charles Ferguson chair in public policy research at Charles Ferguson University and communicates his findings in film rather than print. (I’m reminded of an introduction political scientist Harvey Mansfield gave to Camille Paglia: noting that she is a faculty member at the unheralded University of the Arts in Philadelphia, he observed that “Camille Paglia teaches at the university Camille Paglia teaches at” and asked how many other people that could be said about.)

Inside Job is a well-crafted and thought-provoking documentary about the causes, major milestones, and consequences of the financial meltdown of 2008. At times it looks like a Powerpoint deck with slides depicting financial flows and leveraging of credit default swaps.

In making the documentary, Ferguson attempted to interview a large cross-section of financial sector players, academic experts, and public officials. Ferguson’s style of presenting his interviews is similar to Errol Morris’s, but without the Interratron technology. We hear Ferguson’s voice, but we never see him in conversation with his interviewees. The camera focuses directly on the face of the interviewee and, for some, this turned out to be an unnerving if not excruciating confrontation.

Ferguson had the most expansive co-operation from the analysts, for example Nouriel Roubini, who saw the meltdown coming and were most critical of the financial deregulation that caused it. He also had access to senior overseas officials such as French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

But he was virtually shut out when he attempted to talk to senior officials from the Bush or Obama administrations or to anyone in the finance sector. It appears that the word quickly got out that Ferguson was asking uncomfortable questions on camera, and players, likely advised by counsel, refused to speak to him.

But before the door slammed shut, he managed to interview a handful of leading economics and finance academics who served as both policy-makers at the Fed and Council of Economic Advisers, as well as directors and consultants to the financial sector firms. The most notable were Martin Feldstein and John Campbell of the Harvard Economics Department and Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard and Finance Professor Frederic Mishkin.

Ferguson zeroed in on two questionable practices, writing consulting reports arriving at conclusions the financial sector wanted to hear (“deregulation is good and we need more of it”) and serving as directors of financial sector firms. Ferguson unearthed a study lauding Icelandic financial deregulation for which Mishkin was paid $125,000. Feldstein was a long-time director of the insurer AIG until its collapse in 2008. When asked about the Iceland study, Mishkin squirmed, and when asked about AIG, Feldstein smilingly refused to say anything.

Campbell began his interview cheerfully enough, but when Ferguson suggested that consulting reports like Mishkin’s are comparable to medical research supported by the drug companies, he was at a loss for words. And Hubbard finally told Ferguson the interview was not a deposition, regretted speaking to him, and – on camera – gave him three minutes before booting him out.

(Hubbard’s previous claim to fame was as one of those short-listed for the chairmanship of the Fed in 2006. A group of Columbia Business School students made a satirical YouTube video with a viewcount now approaching 1.7 million – titled Glenn Hubbard every breath you take – depicting his assumed envy towards Ben Bernanke.)

In my view, when academics do consulting, they should be attempting to speak truth to power, that is, giving their best professional judgment, as opposed to telling clients what they want to hear. This should mean seeking out views that the client likely doesn’t want to hear, and seriously discussing them. When academics serve as directors, they should be adding value to the deliberations by bringing an outside and skeptical perspective to corporate decision-making.

The big challenge to acting with integrity is corporate money. $125K is a very rich consulting contract. Ferguson tells us that corporate directorships like AIG and the major US banks pay $250 – $300K, which is the equivalent of a handsome salary in academe. That kind of money seduces otherwise smart and skeptical people into saying what the client wants to hear. In addition, there is always the fear that if you don’t say what the client wants you to say, someone else can readily be found who will.

Ferguson’s film is an attempt to hold bankers, financial regulators, and finance academics accountable. It’s one thing to be held accountable in the court of public opinion, another in the court of law, and Ferguson is skeptical that the latter will ever happen. Whether or not the US ever develops a better way of regulating the financial sector is another matter. The issues are complicated and the government is now divided. Still, Ferguson deserves acclaim for his efforts to incite the moral outrage in civil society that might lead to better governance of the financial sector. I consider his film a must-see.

The man is Philip Gray, who served in the RAF in World War II as the pilot of a Lancaster bomber. The book is his memoir Ghosts of Targets Past, published in London by Grub Street Press in 1995 and available on line. The machine is the Lancaster bomber that stood on a plinth near the Canadian National Exhibition and is now being painstakingly restored after decades of exposure by a band of volunteers at the Canadian Air and Space Museum in Downsview Park, Toronto.

I have tremendous respect and admiration for Mr. Gray. As a young man, he put his life on the line in defense of democratic values, freedom of religion (something that particularly matters to me as a Jew), and indeed western civilization. As a senior citizen, he has preserved the memory of his wartime experience in his book. Most weekends he can be found beside the Lancaster at the museum, selling his book. His being there is not a matter of bragging rights, though he is certainly entitled, but of bearing witness as a link with the past.

I greatly enjoyed Gray’s book and enthusiastically recommend it. His approach is what reviewers call “gritty realism” and anthropologists call thick description. By that I mean Gray goes into considerable detail describing his training, the organizational culture at the RAF’s Stradishall base where his crew was posted, the difficulties and risks of flying bombing missions, and the emotional impacts of a job where death was a commonplace, such as the frequent romances or hookups between pilots and the women working at the base. (The latter brings to mind an old joke about aging: the memory fades, the sex fades, but the memory of sex never fades.)

Professionally I am interested in organizational culture, incentives, and deployment of resources; Gray’s book gave me much to contemplate. He recounts that in the base’s briefing room there was a large color portrait of Air Chief Marshall Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris, with these words printed underneath: “When he says you go, YOU GO!” Gray also mentions that the RAF installed on the underside of the fuselage of the each bomber an automatic camera that took pictures 25 seconds after the bombs were dropped. Gray describes the photos as a “passport of credibility for the crew” to prove that they hadn’t minimized their risk by returning home too quickly.

On one occasion, bad weather forced Gray to land at an American air base, so both his crew and the Americans compared the British Lancasters with the American B-17 Flying Fortresses. The American planes carried much more defensive weaponry, a bigger crew, but only a quarter the payload of the Lancaster. Gray observed that the Americans were using forty men to deliver the same weight in explosives as seven British crewmen.

The Lancasters were flown in a linear stream that bombers stationed at any base could join, while the Americans spent considerable time and fuel marshalling groups of 36 planes into a V formation. Thus, there were sharp differences between the air war as conducted by the Americans, with their much greater resources, and by the tightly constrained British.

The Lancaster is not a beautiful piece of machinery. It has no silver fuselage or delta-shaped wings. It is painted in camouflage black on the bottom and dark green on top. Its nose contains a bulbous gun turret and its fuselage a bulging bomb bay. But it was effective, and a restored Lancaster will remind us of both the Canadian workers who manufactured them at Downsview and the Commonwealth pilots who flew them over Germany.

Remembrance Day is, in its essence, a day to remember those who, serving our country, did not return, and to honor those, like Mr. Gray, who did, and to thank him for sharing his story with us.