Catastrophizing Ultimately is Really About Expectations

If my parents ever disagreed, it was often about politics, religion or money.

In fact, as life-long Republicans, if they couldn’t come to agreement on who they would vote for, my dad would famously say that they just as well not vote then because they would just cancel each other out.

Their marriage lasted 36 years, but during that span, mom usually prevailed when it came to money and religion, but it is the latter that ultimately brought their union to an end.

They are both gone now but a survey of Americans last year found that about 35% of Americans today also find it difficult to discuss politics, and even then I suspect what they hear is influenced by adversarial listening.

Religion falls close behind at 32% but taxes and personal health fall to 21% and 20% respectively.

According to a 2013 poll by Market Pulse on behalf of Wells Fargo, it is finances that Americans find most difficult to discuss (44%) even more than death (38%.)

Ironically, although 71% today learned the importance of saving from their parents, only slightly more than a third (36%) of parents report discussing the importance of saving money with their children on a frequent basis and a large percentage not at all.

American couples find it as hard to discuss money as they do discussing sex.

More than religion, it may have been my father’s struggle with deep episodes of depression as well as my mom’s emotional relationship with money -- spending it that is -- that ultimately pulled them apart.

My dad suddenly showed up to visit me in Alaska after the breakup.  He was deeply depressed but it wouldn’t be for another twenty years before I could talk with him about his depression.

He never let it affect his work but during these episodes he would often sit for hours in the dark without talking.  When I was little, it would scare me.

I know now that he was struggling with deep bouts of feeling inadequate, just as he probably was during his visit to Anchorage after his break up.  I could have said so much that would have been helpful but back then I was more prone to change the subject.

In his extraordinary book entitled, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, Dr. David Burns, a Stanford researcher who helped develop Cognitive Therapy, notes that we really don’t know yet how the brain creates emotions.

Reflection on our own thoughts can either be a powerful stimulant to insight or a spiraling cycle of negative thoughts.  Learning to foster the former and intervene to break the latter is a challenge everyone faces I suppose.

My mom’s emotional relationships with money and food fed into a set of expectations that were very different than my dad’s.  That’s what they really needed to discuss.

I’ve always envied, in a way, the people whom I have come across in life whose “my way or the highway” way of thinking and rationalizing seems so effortless.

Most often though, whenever I was obligated to stand up to someone like this I failed to discuss expectations and instead sailed into analysis.

Occasionally, before catching myself through reflection, I would fall into the all or nothing or black and white thinking trap as well.

A foundation built on clearly understanding expectations is the most essential element for fruitful strategic partnerships.

It is no different with another couple in dispute, Germany and Greece.

French economist Thomas Piketty who wrote, Capital in the Twenty-First Century a book that deals with the evolution of inequality and wealth concentration, reminds us that Germany is being more than a bit hypocritical when it comes to Greece.

Greece was among a number of countries in 1953 that stepped forward to forgive 50% of the massive bailout given to Germany following WWII.

He makes a good point.  Of course, what led to Germany’s indebtedness in 1953 and to Greece’s problems today are very different but no less “moral in stance.”

“Until 2009”, according to Piketty as reported by Chris Harlan on Wonkblog, “Greece forged its books.”  But he notes that austerity measures are forcing the burden on subsequent generations who were not part of that.

Similarly, the post-WWII government in Germany was trying to dig out from under a mess left by the Nazis.  Greece and other countries could have insisted on repayment, creating the same austerity forced on them after WWI which led to WWII.

The struggle regarding Greece’s bailout today is really about expectations more than it is money.

The “catastrophizing,” as cognitive behavior therapists call it, on both sides is just another form of all or nothing thinking.

Prosperity Linked to Proximity to Protected Lands

News headlines about my native Intermountain West always seem limited to a few angry white extremists with guns or elected officials pandering to campaign contributors eager to exploit its natural resources.

Rarely, by the time news gets back to Durham, North Carolina where I live, does it provide more nuanced coverage of this complicated region including news of studies that run counter to those narratives.

Studies I’ve been reading, including one that analyzes the 284 non-metro counties in the west as a whole where there are substantial amounts of protected federal lands, are fascinating.

One study zeroed in on those with lands protected for conservation and analyzes non-metro, county-level economic performance in these places from the present to, in some cases, back as far as the 1970s.  Others analyze the performance of a all 413 counties in the 11 contiguous western states.

The current wave of anti-regulation rhetoric dates not to the 1960s regulations to protect water, air and the food supply or when the EPA was created as many assume or the anti-government rhetoric used by the Reagan administration but not shared by the American public in the 1980s.

The anti-regulation chant of today has its roots in 1947, when partisan post-WWII Republicans resumed the drumbeat of how regulations are a burden regulations are on business, while dismissing that without them an even greater burden is shouldered by individual Americans.

I was born and spent my early years during this period in a million acre- Idaho county wedged into that nook between Montana and Wyoming.  Only 31% of the land area was in private hands such as our ancestral ranch just west of the Henry’s Fork.

More than 58% of Fremont County is under federal protection on behalf of all Americans including a portion of Yellowstone National Park and the Targhee National Forest.

To put this in perspective, the amount of federal lands in my native Fremont County, Idaho is 3.6 times the land area of Durham County, North Carolina where I live but with only 3% of the population.

Only 67,642 acres of the more than of Fremont County is protected for conservation purposes and relevant to the study of all 284 non-metro counties in the west with such lands.

The studies were done by the independent, non-profit, non-partisan Headwaters Economics based in Bozeman, Montana, up and over the Continental Divide and 150 miles north of our ranch where my parents eloped as my dad headed off to WWII.

The study was conducted to determine if these projected lands were associated with decreased or increased economic performance.  The numbers show that performance is higher for every 10,000 acres of protected federal land a county has.

It turns out that the economic performance in non-metro western counties with protected federal lands is as much as 345% on average compared in some areas compared to 83% for non-metro lands in the west with no protected federal land.

Between my junior and senior years of high school, I read A Wilderness Bill of Rights by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who grew up along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Washington State.

Appointed when he was just 40 years of age, his time on the highest court spanned from when my dad was in high school until my law school days.

His words transformed my spiritual and restorative feelings about nature into an entitlement for all Americans, as important as freedoms of speech and religion.

It had a profound impact.

Five years after Douglas retired from the high court, as President Ronald Reagan was elected, the news media, made the mistaken assumption that his popularity meant that his anti-government rhetoric must be widely shared, amplifying partisan news releases.

But both the news media and publicists were mistaken.  Polls following the election showed that only 21% of Americans shared that notion, about the same percentage as in 1976, possibly contributing to approval ratings for Reagan that several years later dipped into the 30% range.

It is the same today.  Americans don’t share anti-regulation rhetoric when the consequences become clear even though the term regulation has been sequestered and demonized my entire lifetime .

Campaign strategists then and now were brilliant, seeking not to sway public opinion but to make certain words radioactive such as environmentalist, federal government and taxes, creating a political correctness that distorted the self-perception of Americans.

It still gridlocks us today.

I much prefer to look at analysis of the actual numbers, not because they will change anyone’s mind but because they provide relief.

Oh, and by the way, studies show that non-rural counties in the west that are exploited for natural resources, actually in the long term suffer economically.

Just sayin’.  Too bad facts don’t have lobbyists.

Exceptionalism Imperative

My lineage as an American goes back 376 years.  By 1840, all but two lines had perpetually been frontiersmen and would continue to forge new settlements for another hundred years, long after the Census declared the frontier closed.

This gives me a different understanding of American “exceptionalism” than many today.  All of my ancestors came to this country in search of religious freedom as Remonstrates, Huguenots, Quakers, Amish, Palatines and Mormons to name a few.

But while forging a new land, they continued to reach back to their homelands and import “best practices.”

Many who wrap themselves in “exceptionalism” today may not have the benefit of that perspective for they seem to have given up on learning from other countries.

A few of my ancestors were Scandinavian including the linage of those who rode with William the Conqueror nearly a thousand years ago to establish what we know as Great Britain.

While throttling American progress over the last three decades or more with anti-tax, antigovernment rhetoric, today’s “exceptionalist wannabees” have ridiculed Scandinavia countries as tax and spend welfare states.

But they have ignored that Scandinavian countries also have some of the strongest economic outcomes in the world.

This country’s founders made it imperative to study and glean everything they could from the powers of that day.  Maybe that is the part we have neglected.

A new study by Dr. Henrik Kleven, a researchers and economist at the London School of Economics, who has also studied at Columbia and UC-Berkeley, unwraps some things we can learn from Scandinavian countries.

Apparently, the data shows that three factors are more important than the level of taxation:

1. Broadening the tax base.
2. Limiting legal tax avoidance (e.g. loopholes.)
3. Public spending focused on complements to work.

Complements to work include using tax revenue to fund universal child care, preschool and elder care etc.

A key finding in the study is that Scandinavians have a different view of poor people than most Americans.  In surveys, only 10-15% of Scandinavians view poor people as lazy compared to 60% of Americans.

The study also notes that “large tax collections go hand in hand with a number of measures of social cohesiveness like civic participation, voter turnout, trust, low crime and so on.”

As for something Americans have been arguing about since our nation’s founding, the study finds that there is a small amount of “tax-charity crowdout,” or the reduction of philanthropy when taxes go up.

But studies show no negative relationship between coercive taxation and voluntary donations, nor does it indicate that Scandinavians are less involved in charity than populations facing smaller tax takes.

There is much to learn from this study but unfortunately belief systems are rarely based on facts.

A More Inclusive Way To View Performance

Durham, North Carolina where I finished my career and still live in retirement just issued a report on how well the convention center here has been doing at erasing operating deficits.

There were some inconsistencies and misperceptions.

At both the city and county levels, Durham has always had excellent professional management during my twenty-five years here and none more so that under Tom Bonfield as city manager.

Governments at every level are not known for being able to fully account for and allot both revenues and costs to facilities. But neither are those in the free market economy.  More on that later including a new approach applicable to all sectors.

The convention center in Durham was always expected to run a deficit.

Back in the day when consultants weren’t punished for being candid with both pros and cons and most were not for sale, the consultant for the proposed Durham convention center projected a $450,000 annual deficit, which would be $1.8 million today.

But thanks to new management it now runs a $167,000 deficit and that is without fully attributing all related revenues.

For instance, if parking and ticket assessments are being used to make DPACs performance look even better, as they should, it seems the city should attribute revenues from the lease of “air rights” above it to the convention center’s bottom line.

The convention center here has always been hampered from harvesting more than its share of the out-of-town conventions and meetings drawn to Durham overall by having far too few hotel rooms in walking distance.

That is about to be more than remedied when by this summer the number of guest rooms at or within less than a block will increase nearly double to nearly 400 and another 259 within a few blocks.

A few are made feasible by revitalization but a good share are due to incessant communication, over nearly three decades now, by Durham’s marketing agency to point out downtown’s strategic location.

It is four miles from Research Triangle Park, adjacent to one Duke campus and two miles from Duke’s main campus and that of North Carolina Central University, as well as the most proximate to dining and entertainment districts.

But as the new management company has proven, the original management company back in 1989 could have closed the gap, had it not cursed the facility with a convoluted identity and a sense of entitlement.

When it opened, it not only made sense to contract management with the adjacent hotel owner but that contract was calibrated as an incentive by essentially covering all of the private hotel’s fixed costs.

But instead, the hotel company tried to brand the convention center merely as its private meeting space while still demanding preferential treatment, if not sole-sourcing to out-of-town groups selecting venues.

The city and county bear some responsibility for their own self-inflicted deficits by being passive until a few years ago with everyone except Durham’s marketing agency which it insisted must refer to the facility by it true identity while somehow dealing with the obfuscation it tolerated  elsewhere.

I cringed when news reports repeated (although in much more genteel language) an urban legend that somehow Durham’s community marketing agency felt “uncomfortable” with the arrangement inferring less had been done for the convention center back when I ran the DMO.

The cardinal rule for a DMO is to do what’s best for the community as a whole when it comes to optimizing visitation including the 10% who attend conventions, while maintaining a level playing field.

When it comes to attracting out-of-town meetings, this isn’t just about being fair to local stakeholders such as hotels and other privately-owned meeting space as well as the convention center but to be absolutely fair to meeting planners and organizers.

The job of a DMO is to draw attention to Durham and then assist while meeting planners and other site selectors make the best decision for their groups as to which venue and part of town are best for their needs.

It is up to each facility including the convention center by that point to close the deal and harvest their share while the DMO provides level platforms for information.

A few community DMOs play favorites, but it is at their peril as has been so often proven, including elsewhere in North Carolina.

However, a level playing field meant that the Durham DMO always did much more to promote downtown Durham, and thus the convention center, than it did for other facilities.

We made sure the other facilities understood why, but that this extra effort would stop short of ever “sole-sourcing” the convention center to a meeting planner which is what the management company and owner of the adjacent hotel demanded.

What did we do extra?  A special section on downtown including several pages of schematics on the convention center, dining maps to show proximity of restaurants, a walking tour, a time/distance/frequency shuttle schedule to and from other hotels and facilities to name just a few examples.

We even intervened to smooth over relations between the convention center management and planners from time to time back then when a sense of entitlement threatened to poison the site selection process.

But none of this overcame the primary reason the convention center performance was limited – the lack of nearby hotel rooms.

Of course there were market trends to blame.  The facility opened just as the nation’s meeting planners shifted preferences to hotel meeting facilities and away from downtowns and conventions centers because the number of facilities rapidly increased, while the number of conventions went into a long slow decline,

That is still underway today.

Until now, Durham’s local governments have avoided the slippery slope many communities have fallen down when they disguise deficits by creating special slush funds to pay out of town groups subsidies to use certain facilities.

Durham visitation outperforms those communities that do “pay for business” according to analyses of participation in activities such as conventions, sports and performing arts where that tactic is used.

Sadly, community marketing organizations and chambers of commerce are often the ones leading communities over this cliff.  But ultimately, the problem is not just a failure to understand the law of supply and demand.

If instead of subsidizing events, cities and counties as well as surrogates such as DMOs and chambers, where they contract other, traditional economic development services, would adopt full cost as well as full attribution accounting, they could make or recommend much better decisions.

This would be looking at the benefits as well as costs of events and facilities more holistically, like an ecosystem.

Maybe the convention center deserves partial credit for an event its existence helped intrigue even when another local facility in the community is selected.

Maybe the Museum of Life & Science deserves partial credit for increased property values in surrounding neighborhoods.  Maybe facilities and events that cannibalize underwriting, should deduct that from overall an event’s overall impact.

It isn’t as far-fetched or complicated as it sounds.

But cities and counties are not alone in the struggle to adapt accounting to be more consistent and inclusive when it comes to fully allotting costs and benefits.

The free market has long avoided “full cost accounting,” instead pushing what are called negative externalities (certain costs) off on consumers and taxpayers.

Even countries are now being challenged to move beyond merely using GDP (gross domestic product) or inputs minus subsidies in value as a measure of economic health.

An alternative to using only GDP is called IW (inclusive wealth) an approach that measures the positive change in human well-being across generations in a country by factoring in the social value of all capital assets, natural, human and produced.

It is consummately free market, just without opaque freeloading.

It has been under refinement since at least 1987 and linked here is the 2014 Inclusive Wealth Report. It doesn’t reject the value of GDP.  It just takes a much more full-accounting approach to growth, and particularly sustainable growth.

Natural capital includes fossil fuels, minerals, forests including non-timber resources and agricultural land.  Human capital involved education and health.  Produced capital includes equipment, machinery, roads etc.

Add them up and deduct things like oil capital gains and carbon damages and you have an Inclusive Wealth Index.  My interest is in natural capital so I’ve read and re-read the 2012 report with a focus on that area.

Each report gives a rating overall for 140 countries and then zeros in on one of the three areas of capital, sort of like a balance sheet is used by the private sector but far more inclusively.

Accounting and metrics such as these are important because they help individuals, communities, states and countries make decisions with a full understanding of the inherent tradeoffs.

To bring it back to subsidizing events, even when the dollars are raised privately, they didn’t just magically appear without having an adverse impact on areas including other events.

Failing to grasp subtleties such as this is how communities make decisions that gradually hollow out unique sense of place.

Inclusive Wealth is a better way of looking at deficits and surpluses as well as a far more inclusive way of measuring impact.

The sooner it filters down to the local level, the better it will be for communities still able to salvage the distinct sense of place that make them worthy of love by both those who live there but those who visit regardless of purpose.

Why Curators and Archivists Make Good Community Marketers

History, it turned out, was the perfect background for community marketing.  Or maybe it was just that community marketing was appealing to a person with a degree in history.

Marketing communities involves leveraging for economic and cultural development the three general types of place-based assets distinct to a particular place:

• Culture and Heritage
• “Built”
• Natural

I don’t just mean the date and event type of history told through documents although that is useful because learning to see patterns and connections - the essence of historical analysis - is also key to marketing innovation and strategy-making.

But also valuable to community marketing are related studies such as:

• Economics:  history viewed through commercial transactions,
• Geology:  history told through rocks and physiography,
• Archeology: history told through artifacts and material remains,
• Anthropology: history told through societies, languages, and values,
• Environment: history told through human interaction with the natural world,
• Genealogy:  history told through family relationships and DNA.

There are others but hopefully these are enough illustration for those who haven’t thought of community marketing as a career or marketers who view it far too narrowly or were taught it only from a commercial perspective.

I’m a little slow.

For all that preliminary background in history, it still took me over half a life-long career to connect those dots.

It also wasn’t until my third startup that I even more formally embedded archives.

Perhaps this is why I was amused to learn recently, the history of my first startup was apparently rewritten exclusive to a much later addition of a word to its name and the second one seems also to have written a revisionist notion of its founding.

Fortunately, should anyone care, I still have personal documents proving my existence there and the roots of each of those organization including their pre-history fingerprints. (smile.)

Frankly, many marketers, even those trained in communications, often seem to play a bit fast and loose with facts and context either because they are too lazy to fact-check using what archives were kept or to make a political statement or even to flatter later executives.

Even more troubling, journalists often pick up these reinterpretations, further contaminating the public record with anecdotal hyperbole.

Thus, the “Research Triangle” is misattributed in a 1957 state brochure as the “brain child” of a later state governor.

And some of us involved in later stages of community turnarounds are flattered with in inaccuracies proclaiming that until our charge these places were a “sleepy backwater,” of that “tumbleweeds blew down empty streets,” or working there was “a death sentence.”

Not true, of course, but that is how history gets polluted.

Part of the problem is that Durham, North Carolina where I finished my career and now live in retirement, while arguably blessed with the deepest, most diverse history of any community, still lacks a full-fledged museum of local history.

This source of resident frustration is indispensable, not just as a cultural amenity but as a touchstone-repository to help newcomers and future generations gain, regain and keep perspective.

Even commercial enterprises, according to Advertising Age, now grasp the importance of “curating, cultivating and preserving the histories of their brands,” not only to inform marketing efforts but because “employees are looking for that heritage and lineage – how they fit into the family tree.”

Many CEOs, according to an article in the Portland Business Journal last summer understand that “the past is a powerful tool in public relations, marketing and branding.”

Or that ultimately they can perpetually “mine the past to recharge the present.”

Dr. Paul Bloom at Yale is often quoted from presentations and papers that “we are obsessed with origin and history…things get value because of their history.”

Consulting archivists at The Winthrop Group, Inc., quote Pendleton’s CEO Mort Bishop as relating “Our heritage is a lot more than a simple matter of using historical materials in marketing…It’s our DNA.”

Others wrote couple of years back in the Harvard Business Review, “A sophisticated understanding of the past is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping the future.”

A McKinsey executive noted that it is “essential for every one of our partners and colleagues to understand our history and how our values were shaped over time.”

Even Entrepreneur Magazine’s startup-rich content heralds the value this depth can bring to storytelling's role in creating brand value.

So why are so many community marketers pinned under the thumbs of those who don’t get it?

In past essays, I’ve frequently noted research showing that even among visitors who skew more to fantasy activities such as shopping, sports, performing arts or amusement parks, destinations that preserve and cultivate authenticity foremost are by many times over the most appealing.

Yet so many elected officials, enabled by their community’s marketers and propelled by “edifice envy,” have, or are quickly surrendering, the authenticity of their particular places.

Maybe my sense of urgency is because it took half a career to dawn on me, and many places won’t have that luxury.

Risk Takers Are Typically Also More Rational

During the first week of the year 2000, Sam Schmidt, an Indy Car race driver who was favored for the upcoming season, slammed into the wall on turn two during testing at Walt Disney World Speedway, leaving him a quadriplegic.

He fought back, got an MBA, bought his father’s company and with a  partner fielded Schmidt Petersen Motorsports, inspiration enough given the risks of racing.  But a new study shows that race drivers are actually more rational than the general population.

Fourteen years after his accident in the days leading up to last month’s Indianapolis 500, Schmidt drove a souped-up Corvette Stingray for several laps around the historic oval.

Using a semi-autonomous technology so he could handle the car with head movements, he hit 100 m.p.h.  Click here to see how it works.  Essentially he bites down to brake, tilts his head left or right to steer and tilts his head back to accelerate.

The development is part of a US Air Force-funded research project, but a new study shows that even amateur race car drivers are actually much “more rational” about choices than the average population.

Like motorcycle riders now who, on average, are in their 40s compared to the average of 24 during in the 1980s, the researchers found it isn’t risk they are immune from.  They are just better immune to “possibility bias.”

This is the overweighting of low probabilities that keep people from trying new things.

Instead they are less likely to overemphasize low-probability events including failure.

The latter fall on the risk-adverse “small-t” part of the T-Personality Spectrum refined by Temple professor and researcher Dr. Frank Farley over the last three decades.

Those who are immune to “possibility bias” are the “Big-T” or “T-Positive” personalities who take risks because they are motivated by intensity and innovation.

According to Farley, these “Big-T” personalities just have a much higher tolerance for uncertainty.  As nation’s go, over its history the USA has been a “Big-T” country according to Farley.

Over the course of its history, Durham, North Carolina has always been a “Big-T” community as are others who focus on being distinct.  “Big-T” is also why Durham’s destination marketing is more innovative than others.

While those who aspire to be “major league” by merely emulating others at the sacrifice of sense of place are probably “small-t” cities.

Farley also classifies gamblers and criminals as “T-Negative” personalities, a group that includes far too many business executives and government officials involved in “legal corruption” too.

When you take lessons to ride a motorcycle, you learn to sense your limitations, ride as though everyone is out to get you and always be alert to escape routes should a problem arise.

In general, motorcycle riders are expert at rationally calculating risk.

You also learn that the death rate for motorcyclists is 30 times higher than it is for drivers of motor vehicles overall, but that this rate falls dramatically depending on type of bike, e.g. sport bikes vs. cruisers like Harleys, and by speed and the age of rider.

I always wear a full-face, modular helmet because injuries occur more often to the jaw than the top of the head.  But ironically, 75% of the fatalities on sport bikes involved riders who also wore helmets of some type.

Interestingly, only half of those riding cruisers or standard motorcycles were wearing helmets when fatalities occurred, another reason perhaps that different types of bikes need to be differentiated for premiums.

But you don’t wear a helmet so you can take risks, you wear it because others who are less rational in vehicles of all type take them irrationally.  That may be why many race drivers feel safest while on the track.

Controlling speed, avoiding alcohol, staying alert and the wisdom of age bring the accident rate for riders down to near that of cars.  Overall, the fatality rate and crash injury rate for 100 million motorcycle miles traveled is 24.93 and 440 respectively.

The latter figure has fallen nearly 60% just since 1989 when I was just more than a third of the way through my now concluded career.

The biggest danger to riders is the same one it is for all vehicles: drivers of cars, trucks and SUVs who don’t pay attention.   And as we know from this assessment of what happened recently on Mt. Rainier, stuff happens no matter what you do to mitigate it.

Motor vehicle drivers are more likely than motorcyclists in my opinion to underestimate risk.  A new study by the National Highway Safety Administration computes that motor vehicle crashes costs society $871 billion annually, nearly $900 for each person living in the United States.

Nearly 70% of that comes from the lost of life as well as pain and decreased quality of life due to injuries. 

Nearly 75% of these costs are shouldered by non-participants through taxes, insurance premiums and congestion-related losses. Funny we don’t hear Tea Partiers whining about this!

The cost to society vs. the individual total $200 billion alone including nearly a fifth for direct medical care, another reason the new federal healthcare insurance requirement makes sense.

Here’s a thought for those obsessed with repealing this requirement: It may be your right to bang yourself up in a vehicle accident, but I shouldn’t later have to pay for it with my taxes or through other means.

Ride or drive stupid if you want, but insurance should be the minimum requirement.

The direct cost of a motorcycle fatality where failure to wear a helmet is involved is nearly $1.3 million alone.

But the direct economic cost to society for not wearing a seat belt is 11 times higher.

This failure results in killing 3,350 people and seriously injuring another 54,300 each year, costing society $13.billion alone, while using them prevented 12,500 fatalities and 308,000 serious injuries.

Using seat belts, which at one time was vigorously opposed by conservatives, saves society $69 billion in medical care, lost productivity, and other injury-related costs.

Two other new studies are disturbing.

One by University of Michigan researchers found that children of minority parents were far less likely to be given age-appropriate restraint while riding in a vehicle compared to the the children of white parents.

Other studies have often found that parents who are minorities, based on their own experiences, often try to counterbalance what they expect their children are going to face in society by being overly flexible, but this is one area where the requirement is a matter of life and death.

Motor vehicles are the leading cause of death and injury for children.

The other study, by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC,) finds something even more disturbing.  An ongoing pilot study finds that pedestrians who are black are passed by twice as many cars before someone yields at an un-signalized marked crosswalk.

Black pedestrians were made to wait 32% longer than white pedestrians.  Subtle forms of racism surface when information and decisions must be processed very quickly.  This may also lead black pedestrians to take more risk in crossing.

Another new study by researchers at the University of Texas and UCLA finds that “executive functions,” the set of skills so essential to success in life and should be taught and learned at a very young age, also play a major role in our assessment of risk.

These include attention (shedding distractions,) working memory and self control, especially the latter.  Too little perhaps and we underestimate risk, too much and we overestimate the possibility or risk, resulting in “possibility bias.”

Both are harmful, one leads to truly dangerous choices, the other to a life not led.

28 Cents To Rescue an Unsustainable Business Model

The old 80/20 rule – 20% of customers drive 80% of sales – doesn’t apply to restaurants where 20% of customers represent 60% of the trips to eat out and generate 66% of the overall spending according to a study by Cardlytics.

That’s why tourism is so important to restaurants because $1 out of every $3 in food and beverage sales nationwide is visitor generated.  The ratio is even higher in communities such as Durham, North Carolina, which have earned reputations as “foodie” destinations.

The 80/20 rule is more like 60/20 for other visitor-reliant industries as well include shopping, groceries, convenience and gas.

Even with locals though, the study reveals that frequency is not the same as loyalty.  In dining, for example, high frequency customers tend to dine at several favorites, while customers who dine less frequently may use one particular restaurant.

The analysis shows that overall, 56% dine at the same restaurant less than half of the time and 44% dine at the same restaurant more than half of their dining trips out.

There are few more complicated businesses to run, especially the locally-owned, independent restaurants that contribute to making communities distinct.

Even the franchises, which tend to eat away at sense of place by making communities the same, are no piece of cake to run, which may be the reason these businesses seem so prickly when it comes to shouldering their fair share of the cost of creating community visitor appeal.

In Durham, out-of-town franchisees have sought to undermine our billboard ban and ordinances to reduce sign blight.  They invested heavily to defeat a 1% prepared food tax that, in part, would have helped clean up the litter they generate.  Nationwide they are among the first to fuss about the minimum wage or providing affordable healthcare.

I agree with several restaurateurs in Durham who believe that business models in many visitor-related industries that rely on low wages are flawed.  Franchise owners, which an observer recently equated to sharecroppers seem to be the most virulent in opposing to paying a living wage or even increasing the minimum wage.

In late 1967, as a teenager with a newly minted drivers license, one of my sisters went to work part time at a cookie bakery for $1.40 per hour.

Adjusted for inflation though, she was making $11 an hour today.  Back then the minimum wage was enough to lift three people out of poverty, today, it is barely enough for one.

Today’s minimum wage is nearly $4 lower than in 1967.

Several dozen studies now show that increases to the minimum wage have a nominal effect on jobs or prices.  Restaurants are a minor exception.  Researchers have found that for every 10% increase in the minimum wage, there is a 0.7 cents increase in restaurant prices.

So the increase to $10.10 currently under discussion might result in a less than a 28 cent increase in restaurant prices.  Oh my!  I am sure at the margins some economist will find a sliver of a fraction who won’t eat out because of the increase, but that will be overwhelmed by the number who will dine out more because they can afford it.

It reminds me of the brouhaha in New York just as I retired a few years ago from a career in visitor centric economic development, when that city required all cabbies to accept credit cards.  What happened?  Cab revenues went up 13% and tips rose from an average of 10% to 22%.

Now, technology is not only disrupting businesses such as cabs with services such as Uber just as Airbnb is disrupting economy lodging, but it is also now making cash registers and check out lines obsolete as well as changing what we know about tipping.

In fact, the app Square, which allows anyone, including a far greater number of employees in stores and restaurants to check people out, saving time for consumers and employees.

In its fourth year since launch, the company already has enough information to break down tipping rates and participation by state and even down to some large metro areas.

Square gives an individual or business user the ability to set screen buttons with a range of tipping options, and there is evidence it is increasing tipping as a practice and the amount tipped.

The average tip nationwide is 16.1% compared to North Carolina where I live which ranks third among states at 16.7%.  But keep in mind that more than 46% tip nothing at all, a percentage of “stiffers” that climbs to 6-in-10 in some states.

Before getting too judgmental, it is important to note that tipping is a learned behavior.  If you didn’t learn how from your parents, a good guide to follow the example of how people in service industries tip one another.

Tipping in some service industries began as a way to incent service, but unfortunately underwent a sort of “bait and switch” in some business models as an excuse for owners and managers to pay less than minimum wage.

I lean toward a mandatory minimum wage but I know it isn’t a panacea and I can empathize with those who have a distaste for anything mandatory.  But this is an area where the free market is inefficient.

As an alternative, maybe like-minded businesses could also borrow something from the coffee sustainability movement spearheaded from Durham-based Counter Culture and begin to brand themselves as “Fair Pay” or better yet “livable wage” businesses.

Fairness is a shared value among Americans.  It is just that some of us think of fairness as distributive, some of us think of it as proportional and some of us think it should be both.

I agree with many who believe this issue isn’t going to go away.  I also agree that paying a fair minimum or livable wage should not enable or be an excuse to retain disengaged workers.  That is an entirely different and equally important issue.  One is macro, the other micro.

I keep coming back to a study published a few months ago by researchers at Cornell and Stanford entitled, Residential Segregation by Income, 1970 – 2009.  The span begins shortly after my sister took that job for $1.40 at the cookie bakery.

In that span, the percentage of families living in middle class neighborhoods fell from 65% to 42%.  A few moved up, the vast majority fell back to low income and poor areas.

That big a shift is something that should concern all of us.