Weiner’s Big Miscalculation

One narrow way of looking at the Anthony Weiner disaster is that it provides a welcome opportunity to think about the costs and benefits of using Twitter — not just for politicians but for all of us. Opponents of Twitter tend to deride it as a service that compresses our thoughts into uselessly — sometimes unintelligibly — short segments of words (they cannot even be called “sentences” in some cases). But another problem with Twitter, as evidenced by Mr. Weiner, is that it makes the act of publicizing a thought ludicrously easy and instantaneous, and that can be very dangerous. Not two or three years ago, political scandals used to require an indiscretion, a lie, a character flaw, or at least a mistake. Now all they need is an errant keystroke. (It is said that Mr. Weiner, despite being one of the more proficient tweeters in Congress, meant to hit the “D” key for direct message, which would have been private, but instead hit the “@” key, which makes the message visible to all Twitter users). The act of sending lewd photography to a 21-year-old woman is of course no less reprehensible if done privately, but it is likely that had Mr. Weiner’s left ring-finger hit the correct key, there would be neither a scandal nor a resignation to talk about.

With Twitter, the distinction between public and private thoughts has become progressively less serious, in part because the process of making private information public has been automated and expedited to an almost absurd degree. By contrast, in the early 1970s, Daniel Ellsberg spent months making copies of the Pentagon Papers, a stash of secret documents detailing U.S. military efforts in southeast Asia. Imagine a man standing in a dark copy room in the Pentagon in the wee hours of the morning, copying thousands of pages one by one, looking over his shoulder for anyone who might be coming through the door. The process by which Ellsberg became a hero — or a villain — was defined by a task that has become obsolete; today, all Ellsberg would have to do is tweet a pdf to someone at the Times or Washington Post.

The effect of this change is twofold. First, it is much easier to publicize all kinds of information — both that created by individuals and that created by the government (in some cases this is a good thing). Second, because of the greater volume of publicly available information and the greater ease of producing it, we no longer care as much when something becomes public (think of the last few Wiki Leaks reports, which garnered about as much attention as DSK, John Edwards, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, and probably less than Tiger Woods or Charlie Sheen).

Because of the unprecedented volume of scandals with which the public is now routinely bombarded, the criteria for what is attention-getting have become that much more selective. People gravitate towards stories involving public figures that they identify with, and the subject almost always has to be sex or violence, or both. (Why Charlie Sheen’s porn star nannies are more interesting to most people than covert military operations in the Middle East is another question entirely.) But whatever the reason, people simply don’t pay attention to stories that are political, procedural, or for lack of a better word, boring; they pay attention to spectacles, particularly the ones in which a celebrity or politician’s head ends up on a pike. So why, if you are a politician, and the bulk of your news is political, procedural and boring, would you want to be using Twitter? The terms are different for a Charlie Sheen, for whom the bulk of the news is neither boring nor political, and who stands only to augment his celebrity by tweeting salacious material.

Which brings us back to Mr. Weiner’s “mistake.” Hendrik Hertzberg rightly pointed out that most people have their sexual secrets and most people would have to deal with some embarrassment, if not professional scrutiny, if those secrets became public. But most people are not sitting congressmen, and so whatever the level of embarassment, most people would not end up having to resign in mortifying fashion. I do not know whether or not most people use Twitter, but it seems that if you are an active politician of any sort, the costs simply outweigh the benefits. Mr. Weiner made a lot of mistakes here — perverse behavior, impulsiveness, lying, so on. But all of that conceals his underlying miscalculation; there was no good reason for him to be using Twitter in the first place.

What Can Apple Teach Us about Health Care Reform?

One way to frame a discussion about health care reform is to ask, “under what conditions would consumers tolerate an increase in the costs and control of health care?” The Affordable Care Act — and most other left-of-center proposals — have answered that question by saying something to the effect of, “consumers will tolerate an increase in costs and control proportionate with health care becoming better.” Conservatives have dismissed this response by saying, roughly, “nothing justifies a rise in costs or control — over health care or any other product.”

This is inevitably a polarizing discussion, in part because the entity currently proposing to enforce greater control over health care products is government, not a private entity. But what if we were to take a step back from the particulars of the health care debate, and think about the idea of a private entity proposing to do something along the lines of what the Obama Administration has been proposing for health care reform?

Imagine a company that exerts a great deal of control over the R&D, design, production, delivery, marketing, and sale of one of its product lines. Imagine that company exerts just as much control over the consumer experience for that product line — fewer variations for consumers to choose from, fewer ways to acquire the product, lots of proprietary features, minimal add-ons and accessories, and so on. And then, imagine that company prices that product line considerably above market competition. The first instinct might be that it would take an idiot to develop such a business model. Following the conservative logic that healthy business begins with untethered consumer choice, this would have to be viewed, at the very least, as a wrongheaded approach.

But what about the example of Apple? Two things about the computer company are for sure: it exerts great control over its product lines, and it is dependably profitable. A recent article in the WSJ describes Apple’s retail store experience in the following way:

A look at confidential training manuals, a recording of a store meeting and interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees reveal some of Apple’s store secrets. They include: intensive control of how employees interact with customers, scripted training for on-site tech support and consideration of every store detail down to the pre-loaded photos and music on demo devices.

Anyone familiar with Apple knows that this “intensive control” is not confined to the retail stores; it is a top-down strategy that has been developed through years of careful research and analysis by Steve Jobs and a hand-picked team of executives, including the recently departed Ron Johnson. That strategy, like the Affordable Care Act, is a response to the question, “under what conditions would consumers tolerate an increase in costs and control?” Apple’s answer contains certain judgments and assumptions that run counter to conventional right-of-center wisdom about consumer choice and market-competitive pricing. And the thing is, Apple’s strategy has worked really well.

The take-away is that increasing the cost and control of a product line is not categorically bad business. It is only bad business if consumers are not also getting a vastly better product. Apple is beating out the competition not because its products are cheaper and more available; its products are neither of those things. Apple is beating out the competition because it makes a vastly better product, and exerts intensive control over every aspect of its business model, from conceptualization, to manufacturing, to sales and marketing, to user experience. Consumers don’t like higher prices and greater control per se, but within reason they will tolerate those drawbacks for a better product.

This same strategy could be applied to health care reform. Consumers don’t need to have more health care options to be happier and better off — that is conservative poppycock. They need a better, more reliable product, even if it is more expensive. Would you rather have the ability to choose between Sony, HP and Dell for your next tablet-computer purchase, or just the ability to buy an iPad from Apple?