I did three posts in early 2015 on what I called "Metaeconomics". I just felt that Economics, as practiced, lacked something fundamental. Generally, there was Micro-Economics, the study of the small and specific, and Macro-Economics, the study of the large and more general. But neither of them seemed to have anything approaching a "big picture" view of the economy as a whole. So I coined Meta-Economics in an effort to supply a truly big picture.
The effort was a failure. I am only now, roughly four years later, returning to the subject. Normally, I recommend going back to my older posts because I think they generally hold up well. I can't do that in this case. But, if you want to check them out anyhow, here are links to those earlier posts:
http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/01/metaeconomics-introduction.html,
http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/02/metaeconomics-panic-of-08.html,
http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2015/03/metaeconomics-markets.html.
The basic problem with Economics is that there has been no major breakthrough in more then 50 years. For a long time "Keynesian" Economics (named after John Maynard Keynes) dominated the field. The major ideas date back to the '30s. For a few decades "Friedman" Economics (named after Milton Friedman) supplanted it. It came to the forefront in roughly the '70s. And in the last few years, roughly since the crash of '08, Keynesian Economics has come back into style, and is again the most popular economic theory. There is no post-Keynes/Friedman economic theory that has been able to supplanting either or both of these old theories.
These theories contribute modestly to our understanding of the economy and have modest predictive power. In some periods Keynesian Economics has a better predictive track record. In other periods Friedman Economics has a better predictive track record. Both have suffered major misses. Both are only good for making predictions or providing explanations for the behavior of the economy as a whole. There mechanisms for keeping the economy on track are "raise taxes substantially" or "cut taxes substantially". These remedies are one step removed from operating some kind of simple on/off switch.
To provide a clearer picture of the dismal state of the "Dismal Science", a common nickname for the study of Economics, I am going to compare it with weather prediction.
A couple of hundred years ago weather prediction consisted of folk wisdom like "red sky at night, sailor's delight [good weather], red sky at morning, sailor's take warning [bad weather]". To this was added the dependence of the general state of the weather on the calendar. In the northern hemisphere it is generally colder in the winter and warmer in the summer. Events like the monsoon season tended to start and end at roughly the same time in the calendar year.
Slowly that situation improved. People studied and categorized clouds. They noticed that weather patterns tended to move from one area to another following roughly the same path. As they moved they tended to evolve in predictable ways. Things slowly evolved to the point where a one day forecast was pretty reliable in the '60s.
A contributing factor was the study of fluid dynamics, the way fluids like air behave, and the study of atmospheric chemistry. This led to a theoretical ability to predict the weather. The problem was that using "first principles" (the underlying chemistry and physics of the atmosphere) to predict the weather was impractical. It might take a hundred years on the fastest computer then available to perform the calculations necessary to accurately predict tomorrow's weather.
There was also a severe shortage of data. Sparse ground observations were available. A few readings from perhaps a thousand points in the US were available. The situation was even worse at sea. Many merchant ships collected basic weather data as they went about their business. But data was only available for the places the ship went and it was subject to delays sometimes measured in months.
Since then, two things have happened. First, satellite data collection has resulted in the availability of large amounts of data for all parts of the earth. And the data is available in near-real-time (a delay of perhaps an hour). And the most powerful computers have become very much more powerful that those available in the '60s. The super-computers now available can perform the exact same forecast calculation that would have taken a hundred years back then in something like a second.
So weather forecasts are now pretty good stretching out several days. And forecasts of seasonal (or longer) weather trends are remarkably good. And one of the things that has happened is that the "surprise factor" has been almost completely eliminated. In the '60s a major storm swept into my area with zero warning. More recently "Superstorm Sandy" was not accurately predicted (at least in the US) until it was almost upon us. But in both cases improvements have been made that make a repeat of either event unlikely.
Back then there was little satellite coverage of the Pacific Ocean off the Washington Coast. So the storm was invisible until it made landfall. Now satellite coverage is much better. But the key thing is that a weather radar has been installed on the Washington Coast that is capable of scanning out a hundred or so miles into the Ocean.
In the case of Superstorm Sandy, the biggest contributing factor was that the US only had access to wimpy super-computers in the Weather Bureau. The Europeans had a much better super-computer (and a somewhat better software). The US has since installed bigger super-computers and improved their software. Superstorm Sandy drove home the message that the US needed to up its game.
The situation in my neck of the woods is actually pretty good now. Forecasts are still off. But usually what is going on is that the forecast errs slightly in its prediction of when or where something is going happen. Completely missing a big storm, like what happened in the '60s, look to be a thing of the past. Still, small errors in location or timing can make a tremendous difference in people's lives.
In the recent snowfall in my area my sister, who lives a few tens of miles from me, got about five times as much snow as I did. I was able to get around in my four wheel drive Subaru if I really needed to. My sister, who owns a similar car, couldn't. The snow in her area was just too much for her car to handle. So a "small" difference in location translated to a large difference in the impact the storm had on people.
Tornados are small events. The touchdown area is perhaps a few hundred yards wide and a few miles long. The conditions that cause a tornado to form are little different from the conditions where no tornado forms. Small errors in distance, time, or conditions,can make the difference between life and death, or between being completely wiped out or suffering no damage at all. The same is true when it comes to predicting the time and place of landfall for a Hurricane. So getting it exactly right can be critically important. But still, getting it really close to right is a big improvement over "I have no clue".
Now consider the situation when it comes to Economics. There is no "big data" when it comes to economics. An economist can run the latest state of the art model on a five year old PC and get the result almost immediately. The models are relatively simple and the quality and quantity of data they have access to is similar to what weather forecasters had access to two hundred years ago.
If you gave the weather forecasting people a supercomputer that was a thousand times as fast as the ones they currently have access to they would have no problem keeping it busy. More importantly, they would use the massive increase in computing power to turn out noticeably better forecasts.
Weather forecasters have to hobble their software because they only have about eight hours to turn out a forecast for what's going to happen a day out. This forces them to make simplifications that substantially reduce the calculation's ability to get it right. They have to do this in order to keep the run time of the forecast acceptable.
With a supercomputer that was a thousand times faster, fewer simplifications would be necessary. That would make the forecast more realistic. And that would make it more accurate. An accurate forecast of what the weather will look like tomorrow that takes a week to run is useless.
Economists do not have this problem. They don't have to hobble their models to get them to finish in a timely manner. "Fast", in economic terms, is measured in days. Anything that can turn out a result in a few hours is fast enough. And pretty much any PC made in the last five years can do this for pretty much any economic model currently in use.
The problem is that there is little data to put into the models. So even performing an elaborate and complex analysis of this data doesn't take very long. This, coupled with economic models that are no more sophisticated than weather models of a couple of hundred years ago, results in economic forecasts that are not very reliable and don't tell you much.
Economies tend to evolve in a modestly predictable manner. The economy of one country has some influence on other countries. That's it. That's all. The result is that the crash of '08 was every bit as big of a surprise to economists as the storm that hit my part of the country all those decades ago. There is no Economics equivalent of the satellite data that forecasters use. There is no Economics equivalent of the "first principles" understanding of the economic equivalent of the chemistry and physics that undergirds weather models.
People who study the weather can calculate the average temperature for the US for a given year. It is useful in tracking Global Warming and for not much else. But they can also drill down to days and locations and tell you in great detail what happened. In fact, they generate the "US average temperature" by, in effect, summing up all those detailed numbers.
The Economists equivalent of this one number is the GDP (Gross Domestic Product - a commonly used measure of the size of the economy as a whole) for the entire US for a particular year. The difference is that's pretty much all Economists can tell you about the economic "weather". They can't drill down and tell you what's happening in this small piece of the economy on this specific day. Like average temperature for the year, GDP for the year tells you something useful. But it doesn't tell you anywhere near as much as having the economic equivalent of a daily weather forecast for each small piece of the economy would.
But, whereas pretty reliable daily forecasts of the weather in a relatively small area are available, economists have pretty much no clue as to what is happening on a day by day basis or for small parts of the economy. They can perhaps provide economic data for a state for a given month or quarter but finer grained data is just not available.
And if you don't have that kind of fine grained data, you can't do fine grained economic forecasts. And, since you can't do these kinds of forecasts you can't test various models to see what works best.
Everybody has been "scoring" weather forecasts for accuracy since before any of us were born. That feedback, this forecast got the right answer, that forecast got the wrong one, is the key to developing and testing competing theories of how weather works and, more importantly, how to forecast what it is going to do next. Weather theories that work poorly get discarded in favor of theories that work better. Sometimes "crazy" theories work better than sensible ones. In the absence of competitive testing, "sensible" economic theories persist even when it is pretty obvious that they have major problems.
Keynesians have been battling with the people who follow Friedman for many decades now. Both theories have major problems. Why haven't both been discarded in favor of a theory that works better than both? Because the ability of Economists to carefully test theories is so poor that both factions have insufficient reason to abandon their theory.
All each side knows is that the theory championed by the other side is "fatally flawed". There may be some looney sounding theory that works better than either. But it tends to get laughed out of the room without getting a serious test. And that's because a serious test, one that is truly convincing to all the experts, does not exist. There is always "sufficient reason" to not discard a theory. On the other hand, the evidence supporting a new theory is always judged to be insufficient. So little or no progress is made.
The economic equivalent to satellite weather data actually exists. Banks and bank-like entities process billions of money transactions each day using computers and databases. There is no technical reason why all this data can't be swept up and deposited into a central repository. If such a central repository existed, and if economists had access to it, this would be a game changer.
It would finally be possible to accurately and reliably report what the "economic" weather was on a certain day and in a certain small part of the economy. That, in and of itself, would be a massive change from the present state of affairs. Economists would finally have access to big data.
With accurate and reliable data for small parts of the economy and spanning small periods of time, it would be possible to start creating forecasts and testing them against the data. There would finally be a compelling reason to discard one economic model in favor of another. The criteria would shift from "is it sensible or not?" to "does is work or not?"
It would also provide the data on which "first principles" could be developed that serve a purpose similar to the fluid dynamics, chemistry, and physics, understanding that is possible with the weather. We could develop a theory of "money physics".
Various "money physics" theories have been developed at one time or another. But it has not been possible to subject them to the kind of credible and rigorous testing that is immediately convincing to a large majority of people in the field. It would be possible to shift the debate from "which theory do I like?" to "which theory works?" That's an environment in which real progress becomes possible.
What I am talking about here is a theoretical possibility. In theory, the data is available, but only in theory. No one has seriously proposed that somehow all this data be made widely available to scientists in a way analogous to the treatment of weather data. There are a whole host of reasons why it is presently inconceivable that such a thing would be allowed. I am not going to bother listing them.
But the economy is like the weather in the sense that a bunch of small scale events combine to create the big picture. People spend money, or not. People buy this and not that. Companies and governments behave similarly. The aggregate of all of these financial decisions is then combined according to "money physics" rules that we currently don't understand very well. The result is the amount of aggregate economic activity we see or don't see.
If you just say "tomorrow's weather is going to be exactly the same as today's" you will have about an eighty percent success rate at predicting the weather. Predicting economic activity is slightly more complicated. People's pattern economic activity depends on whether it's a "work" day or a "weekend" day, for instance. But if you make a couple of small adjustments to account for things like workday/weekend, then you can achieve a very accurate forecast of tomorrow's economic "weather". Unfortunately, professional economists are capable of little better than that. They often don't even do that well.
This ignorance costs us all. We all know that it should be possible to do better. Economics that works would allow us to discard economic policies that are harmful and replace them with policies that are helpful. The problem is that there is no way to convincingly rate economic policies on a harmful/helpful scale. So people get invested in one economic theory or another without having any real idea if the theory they favor is better or worse than the alternatives.
To the extent that we can tell, there are a lot of harmful policies being pursued. But the supporters of those policies can persuasively argue for their retention because the argument that the policy is harmful is on shaky ground. That's because the arguments for or against any particular economic policy are on shaky ground. So which policies are implemented and which are discarded depends more on the political power of supporters and detractors than anything else.
I'm out of ideas. More importantly, the profession seems to be out of ideas too. And this is in spite of the fact that the current "state of the art" in Economics is pretty bad. As a result, progress is unlikely. So, there isn't a good reason to continue the discussion of this subject. So, for the moment I am wrapping it up. If the situation changes, I'll reopen the subject.
If you want a ray of hope, geology was in bad shape in the '60s. Then Plate Tectonics came along "out of left field" and revolutionized things from top to bottom almost overnight. Geology has been an active field that has seen tremendous forward progress since. The thing about a "Plate Tectonics" type idea is that no one sees it coming. Economics could be revolutionized by a similar "no one saw that coming" idea at any time. I don't know what such an idea would look like but that's exactly the point.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Sunday, February 10, 2019
Perry Mason - part 2
In 2016 I posted an article entitled "Perry Mason - part 1". Here's a link to it: http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/10/perry-mason-part-1.html. In it I argued that the "Perry Mason" stories are second only in their influence to the "Sherlock Holmes" stories. I think that statement still stands up. I also argued that, while the Mason stories did a lot of good, they also did a lot of harm.
For this post I want to expand on that latter conclusion, that they did a lot of harm. I will do so by examining a single Mason story in some detail. I have chosen "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye". The story was published in 1935, two years after Erle Stanley Gardner published his first Mason story, and well before Mason reached the peak of his popularity and influence. It is also the first story to feature District Attorney Hamilton Burger, Mason's most frequent courtroom adversary.
I am going to start by laying out a great deal of the plot and highlighting many of Mason's actions. I will then analyze these actions and indicate why I think this has caused a lot of harm. Here goes.
***** Start of the Summary of "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye"
A new client, Peter Brunold, appears in the office of Los Angeles based lawyer Perry Mason. He has a very fishy sounding story. He owns a set of high-quality glass eyes. One of them has been replaced by a cheap knockoff. He is worried that the theft will end up wrongly involving him in a crime. This is because the high-quality eye can be traced back to him.
He pays Mason a retainer of $1,500. In 1935 that represents the annual salary of an ordinary person, so it would be equivalent to $50,000 in today’s money. He has that much on his person in cash.
Perry offers to fix his problem by introducing two or more low quality glass eyes into the investigation in such a way as to confuse things and mislead the police. In other words, he offers to interfere with a legitimate police investigation.
In service of that he instructs Paul Drake, owner of the Drake Detective Agency, and for the entire series, Mason’s “go to” guy for investigative work and much else, to hire a hotel room under a false name and buy some cheap glass eyes in a manner that can’t be traced back to either Drake or Mason. Drake does so.
Brother and sister Harry and Bertha McLane next enter Mason’s office requesting his assistance. Their request at first seems completely unrelated but, as is common in Mason books, everything will end up all connected together by the end. They (they often operate as a tag team) request Mason’s assistance. They accuse another person, who we later learn is Hartley Basset, of blackmail, extortion, usury, and financing a smuggling operation. We later learn that the accusations are true.
Harry then confesses to the embezzlement of over $3,000 (we later learn the exact amount is just under $4,000) from Hartley (later murder victim number one). Harry also implicitly admits to gambling, then completely illegal. (This was before Las Vegas, for instance.)
Mason initially advises them to go to the authorities but changes his mind and decides “I’m going out . . . and compound a felony”.
Later Silvia Basset (wife of Hartley) asks Mason to assist her in committing bigamy. She also asks for help in suborning perjury in furtherance of the bigamy scheme.
Along the way Mason is threatened with assault, I believe by Dick Basset, son of Sylvia (but not by Hartley).
Still later Sylvia tells Mason over the phone that someone has been assaulted in her house. When that fails to get Mason to come running, she says that a murder is about to take place. If not stopped, Dick will murder Hartley. Mason comes running.
Mason breaks many traffic laws on the way to her house.
Upon his arrival a “38” revolver is brandished. The gun turns out to be unloaded but shells, including one that has been fired, are produced. Mason confiscates the gun and ammunition, but Sylvia eventually ends up with them.
The fact of the assault is confirmed. Hazel Fenwick, secretly the wife of Dick, has been assaulted by a “person unknown”. Mason phones the police asking them to send some officers. He identifies himself as “Richard Basset”, supposedly in an effort to speed up their response.
Before the police arrive the death of Hartley is discovered. There are indications that it is a suicide, but we later learn otherwise. There is a “confession” in support of the suicide hypothesis. But it is the usual (in murder mysteries, at least) typewritten and unsigned confession.
Subsequent investigation turns up a second gun which has also been fired. Additionally, it turns out that Hartley is wearing a third gun, which has not been fired.
Fenwick indicates that the man who assaulted her was wearing a hastily constructed carbon paper mask. The mask had two eyeholes and one of the eyeholes showed a socket rather than an eye. She was also able to tear the mask away, so she got a good look at her assailant, but the assailant did not get a good look at her.
Mason instructs Fenwick, a material witness, to leave the scene of the crime using his car and to go to his office. He arranges for Della Street, his personal secretary throughout the entire series, to be waiting there for her. We subsequently learn Fenwick never arrived.
Mason is present when Sylvia plants the first gun, now loaded, at the scene of the crime.
Mason then instructs Sylvia to lie to the police in a scheme to thwart their efforts to interview her.
Mason refuses to disclose the name of his client (Brunold) on the theory that it is not required in a case where the only crime is assault.
When the police determine that Hartley was murdered, Mason then discloses that he sent Fenwick to his office.
Drake finds out that Sylvia is staying in a specific room at a specific hotel under a specific fake name.
They both go there but determine that the police have an extensive surveillance operation in place. They find a way to talk to Sylvia anyway. The police eventually identify Mason. But Mason and Drake, using a variety of schemes, get away cleanly. Part of this process involves Drake picking the lock of a hotel room.
Drake’s subsequent investigation of Fenwick determines that she is actually a “black widow” who marries then murders men. He also determines a number of the names she has used in the past.
Mason instructs Drake to hire a ringer to impersonate Fenwick. She must be “hungry enough so she won’t argue” with whatever Mason asks of her. This might include illegal activities, but she is actually asked only to do legal things. Mason never makes it clear to her that she will only be asked to do legal but perhaps sketchy things. She agrees before knowing exactly what she will be asked to do and ultimately holds up her end of the deal.
The ringer is instructed to fly to Reno and register under her real name. If asked, she is instructed to deny being any of the aliases Drake has uncovered for Fenwick. But she is instructed to “accept service” of divorce papers intended for Fenwick and listing a number of her aliases. She is also instructed to “clam up” under police and press questioning and to fight extradition from Nevada to California.
Drake is also told to slip a “newspaper friend” $50 to take some pictures. The photographer is instructed to misrepresent who he is working for and say the pictures are for a newspaper story. The pictures are to be taken of a specific group of people in a very specific way.
Mason disguises the actual reason for the pictures to everyone. He wants to determine if any of the photographed people has a glass eye. Mason’s primary client, Brunold, is missing an eye. Brunold’s missing glass eye was found clutched in the hand of the murdered Hartley.
Harry calls Mason and discloses that he is staying in a specific room of a specific hotel under a specific fake name. Harry orders Mason to come, which he does. There he finds Harry murdered.
Mason plants one of the glass eyes Drake procured earlier in Harry’s dead hand. He then determines that the police have another surveillance operation under way. So, he engages in an elaborate ruse so that he appears to have a legitimate reason to be at the hotel. The ruse is also supposed to fool the police into believing he didn’t get to the murder scene first. The ruse succeeds so the police think they got to the murder scene before Mason did.
We then skip forward to the preliminary court hearing. Mason has arranged for the authorities to catch up with his Fenwick ringer just as the court proceedings are reaching a critical stage. Drake serves the divorce papers on her in Reno, but he thinks he has screwed up because the press and the authorities are lying in wait when he gets to her hotel room. He also appears to not recognize the ringer he found in the first place. (My best guess is that Drake’s failure to recognize her is just a continuity mistake on Gardner’s part.)
Burger accuses Mason of witness tampering and other unprofessional and perhaps illegal behavior. For instance, Mason has repeatedly instructed his fake Fenwick to “take the fifth”, which she does. Burger serves a subpoena to Mason in open court in the middle of the preliminary hearing on Harley’s murder. The subpoena directs Mason to appear before a Grand Jury and explain himself. Of course, things never get that far because everything is straightened out before the Grand Jury hearing can even be scheduled.
But this behavior gives Mason an opening to discourse in open court on his theory of the case. This permits him to get critical material introduced into the record that he might not otherwise have been able to.
A short time later in the presiding Judge’s quarters Mason is able to name the real murderer, James Overton. He has a military and police background and was hired by Hartley ostensibly as the chauffeur. He was actually there to spy on Hartley’s wife. In the course of his spying he learned and did things he shouldn’t have. He also has a glass eye.
He is killed in a shootout as he is trying to flee.
Overton was involved with Harry in the embezzlement scheme. So, all three bad guys, Hartley, Harry, and Overton end up dead. Justice triumphs and everything ends up tied up neatly into a bow.
***** End of the Summary of "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye"
I will not pretend this covers every development in the book. But it gives you enough to loosely follow the story. And it includes all of the Mason activities I find problematic.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Mason has a near-infallible lie detector. This gets a lot of use in this (and pretty much all the other) Mason stories. The story starts with his primary client telling what is obviously a lie. Mason must separate truth from fiction. Why would he even want such a client (other than the obvious reason that he is rich and is willing to pay Mason well)?
And what's Mason's proposed solution? To interfere with a legitimate investigation by planting false evidence. And he brings Drake onboard as an accomplice.
The second set of clients (the McLane siblings) fall into a similar category. They are up front about the fact that they want assistance in getting away with various crimes. And along the way they indicate that a third party, Hartley the soon to be murder victim, is up to his neck in criminality. And Mason's response is to promise to compound a felony. Compounding a felony is a crime and constitutes the highest level of unethical behavior by a lawyer.
And then there is the conflict of interest. Mason originally agrees to represent Brunold. Then he agrees to undertake legal duties for the McLanes, one of which is both a bad guy and gets murdered. But conveniently by this time Mason mostly confines himself to being in the sister's corner. And Mason is providing legal assistance to Sylvia and, at least to a modest extent, to Fenwick, Fenwick is eventually exposed as a "black widow" and a murderer. Fortunately (?), she doesn't murder any of the characters in this book.
Will the crimes ever cease? Nope! Traffic laws are broken. Since no one was harmed and Mason wasn't caught I suppose they don't count. But Mason is an accessory to the planting of evidence. He spirits a material witness away from the authorities. He councils someone to lie when being questioned. He is an accomplice to Drake using lock picks to "break and enter" a hotel room. He personally plants evidence at the scene of a crime after going to elaborate efforts to be in a position to do so. Specifically, he has Drake use deception to procure a cheap glass eye.
He seeks out and hires a woman so desperate she is willing to engage in unspecified illegal behavior. The fact that ultimately she does not have to do anything illegal doesn't mitigate the fact that Mason went out of his way to find someone so desperate that she was willing to do something illegal simply for the promise of a generous payoff. It was the middle of the Great Depression and lots of people were truly desperate. Mason has no compunction about taking advantage of this.
Everybody lies. Everybody schemes. No one seems to feel they are bound by the laws or the canons of ethics, judicial or otherwise. Everyone from a desperate woman to a newspaper photographer can be bought. In other Mason stories cops are "tipped" $20 for a favor and expensive cigars are delivered to the Office of the District Attorney in exchange for other favors.
Mason happily plays in this "law of the jungle" world. He is happy to do what it takes to get his client off. The final justification is that his client is innocent. The problem is that this kind of behavior on one side justifies similar behavior on the other side.
And in reading this or other Mason books it is startlingly obvious that all this activity takes place in a small club whose members consist of the entitled, their associates, and their employees. Mason couldn't do what he does if he didn't have a lot of money to throw around. The Fenwick ringer is paid $500, a fantastic amount of money at the time. Drake at one time says he has 20 operatives investigating something Mason is interested in. People fly back and forth to Reno, on one occasion in a chartered plane that is the "fastest one available". Air travel at that time was extremely expensive. And so it goes.
This can only happen if there is a small club of the rich and powerful who play by one set of rules while everyone else plays by different rules. Mason calls the cops and expects them to show up quickly, which they do. Why? Because he is calling from a rich man's house. The rich man employs a maid, secretary, and chauffeur that we know of. There are likely three or four full time staff around that fail to make an appearance. This is not "lifestyles of average folk". At this time most people didn't even own a car. Della Street, Mason's private secretary owns a fur coat but no car.
Only rich (and white) people have the time and resources with which to engage in as much bad behavior as we see on display here. One "rich adjacent" person manages to run up gambling debts amounting to almost $4,000. As I commented above, at the time this was roughly three times the annual salary of an ordinary person. (One person in the story is earning $70 per month and another person is earning $100 per month.)
All of Mason's actions are ultimately justified because his client actually is innocent and, therefore, being unjustly accused. That, and because Mason ultimately does expose what truly happened and who is truly guilty. And if in the real world everybody was rich and the government had nearly unlimited resources with which to investigate each crime (in this story two different surveillance operations are mounted with teams that in each case amounted to several people) then the kinds of rules on display here might possibly be appropriate.
But, as I indicated previously, that is rarely the case in the real world. In reality both sides are severely resource constrained. The cops would like to investigate more crimes and more thoroughly investigate the crimes they do investigate. The same is true of District Attorney's offices. They would like to throw more resources at more cases but they have a finite budget. So in both cases priorities are imposed that mean many cases are not investigated or are only superficially investigated. And most District Attorney's offices tend to focus on "slam dunk" cases while only occasionally taking on a complicated high profile case that might not be a slam dunk.
And the practical result is that complicated cases get short shrift. A potential defendant can make any case look complicated if he has the power and/or wealth to throw a lot of resources at it. So poor people get prosecuted because they don't have the resources to put up a serious fight. They may not even have bail money or money to pay traffic tickets on time.
Going after some poor schmuck who ran into a piece of bad luck is easy. Going after a rich SOB who will "fight you all the way to the Supreme Court" only rarely happens. It doesn't matter that the poor person's crime may amount to nothing and the rich person's crime may have horrific consequences.
This plays out all the time. People are still routinely jailed over small amounts of pot. Even in jurisdictions like the one I live in(Seattle) where pot is now legal, poor people are hassled for things like broken tail lights or parking in the wrong place or whatever. They committed the crime.
But pretty much no one involved in the Mortgage meltdown of several years ago went to jail. Yet banks foreclosed on mortgagors who were actually current on their payments. People were sold mortgages with terrible terms when they qualified for ones with much better terms. Bank fraud was uncovered. Junk securities were sold as investment grade when they weren't. And on and on and on. These crimes had awful consequences. But they were complicated and the cases were hard to win. The result in almost all cases was a decision to not bother prosecuting.
People like Michael Cohen make a very good living by using pit bull tactics against people of lesser means. The fact that people like Cohen routinely engage in illegal or unethical behavior normally results in no investigation and almost certainly in no sanctions. The rich and powerful look out for the rich and powerful. The rest of us are on our own.
And Mason definitely operated in the world of the rich and powerful. And he popularized many of the pit bull tactics that people like Michael Cohen used several generations later. In Mason's world these tactics were used against other members of the club. In the real world that never happens. People like Cohen and the people who employ people like Cohen don't go after other people like themselves. They go after people who are not sufficiently resourced to fight back. They know they will almost always win because the system is rigged to make sure they almost always win.
But if you want to see a Mason-like fight that is happening in the real world I do have a suggestion for you. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and multibillionaire, is going after the extremely well connected and very powerful millionaire David Pecker and the company he runs, AMI. Bezos has The Washington Post in his corner. Pecker has The National Inquirer in his corner. Now that's a contest where the fighters are much more evenly matched.
For this post I want to expand on that latter conclusion, that they did a lot of harm. I will do so by examining a single Mason story in some detail. I have chosen "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye". The story was published in 1935, two years after Erle Stanley Gardner published his first Mason story, and well before Mason reached the peak of his popularity and influence. It is also the first story to feature District Attorney Hamilton Burger, Mason's most frequent courtroom adversary.
I am going to start by laying out a great deal of the plot and highlighting many of Mason's actions. I will then analyze these actions and indicate why I think this has caused a lot of harm. Here goes.
***** Start of the Summary of "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye"
A new client, Peter Brunold, appears in the office of Los Angeles based lawyer Perry Mason. He has a very fishy sounding story. He owns a set of high-quality glass eyes. One of them has been replaced by a cheap knockoff. He is worried that the theft will end up wrongly involving him in a crime. This is because the high-quality eye can be traced back to him.
He pays Mason a retainer of $1,500. In 1935 that represents the annual salary of an ordinary person, so it would be equivalent to $50,000 in today’s money. He has that much on his person in cash.
Perry offers to fix his problem by introducing two or more low quality glass eyes into the investigation in such a way as to confuse things and mislead the police. In other words, he offers to interfere with a legitimate police investigation.
In service of that he instructs Paul Drake, owner of the Drake Detective Agency, and for the entire series, Mason’s “go to” guy for investigative work and much else, to hire a hotel room under a false name and buy some cheap glass eyes in a manner that can’t be traced back to either Drake or Mason. Drake does so.
Brother and sister Harry and Bertha McLane next enter Mason’s office requesting his assistance. Their request at first seems completely unrelated but, as is common in Mason books, everything will end up all connected together by the end. They (they often operate as a tag team) request Mason’s assistance. They accuse another person, who we later learn is Hartley Basset, of blackmail, extortion, usury, and financing a smuggling operation. We later learn that the accusations are true.
Harry then confesses to the embezzlement of over $3,000 (we later learn the exact amount is just under $4,000) from Hartley (later murder victim number one). Harry also implicitly admits to gambling, then completely illegal. (This was before Las Vegas, for instance.)
Mason initially advises them to go to the authorities but changes his mind and decides “I’m going out . . . and compound a felony”.
Later Silvia Basset (wife of Hartley) asks Mason to assist her in committing bigamy. She also asks for help in suborning perjury in furtherance of the bigamy scheme.
Along the way Mason is threatened with assault, I believe by Dick Basset, son of Sylvia (but not by Hartley).
Still later Sylvia tells Mason over the phone that someone has been assaulted in her house. When that fails to get Mason to come running, she says that a murder is about to take place. If not stopped, Dick will murder Hartley. Mason comes running.
Mason breaks many traffic laws on the way to her house.
Upon his arrival a “38” revolver is brandished. The gun turns out to be unloaded but shells, including one that has been fired, are produced. Mason confiscates the gun and ammunition, but Sylvia eventually ends up with them.
The fact of the assault is confirmed. Hazel Fenwick, secretly the wife of Dick, has been assaulted by a “person unknown”. Mason phones the police asking them to send some officers. He identifies himself as “Richard Basset”, supposedly in an effort to speed up their response.
Before the police arrive the death of Hartley is discovered. There are indications that it is a suicide, but we later learn otherwise. There is a “confession” in support of the suicide hypothesis. But it is the usual (in murder mysteries, at least) typewritten and unsigned confession.
Subsequent investigation turns up a second gun which has also been fired. Additionally, it turns out that Hartley is wearing a third gun, which has not been fired.
Fenwick indicates that the man who assaulted her was wearing a hastily constructed carbon paper mask. The mask had two eyeholes and one of the eyeholes showed a socket rather than an eye. She was also able to tear the mask away, so she got a good look at her assailant, but the assailant did not get a good look at her.
Mason instructs Fenwick, a material witness, to leave the scene of the crime using his car and to go to his office. He arranges for Della Street, his personal secretary throughout the entire series, to be waiting there for her. We subsequently learn Fenwick never arrived.
Mason is present when Sylvia plants the first gun, now loaded, at the scene of the crime.
Mason then instructs Sylvia to lie to the police in a scheme to thwart their efforts to interview her.
Mason refuses to disclose the name of his client (Brunold) on the theory that it is not required in a case where the only crime is assault.
When the police determine that Hartley was murdered, Mason then discloses that he sent Fenwick to his office.
Drake finds out that Sylvia is staying in a specific room at a specific hotel under a specific fake name.
They both go there but determine that the police have an extensive surveillance operation in place. They find a way to talk to Sylvia anyway. The police eventually identify Mason. But Mason and Drake, using a variety of schemes, get away cleanly. Part of this process involves Drake picking the lock of a hotel room.
Drake’s subsequent investigation of Fenwick determines that she is actually a “black widow” who marries then murders men. He also determines a number of the names she has used in the past.
Mason instructs Drake to hire a ringer to impersonate Fenwick. She must be “hungry enough so she won’t argue” with whatever Mason asks of her. This might include illegal activities, but she is actually asked only to do legal things. Mason never makes it clear to her that she will only be asked to do legal but perhaps sketchy things. She agrees before knowing exactly what she will be asked to do and ultimately holds up her end of the deal.
The ringer is instructed to fly to Reno and register under her real name. If asked, she is instructed to deny being any of the aliases Drake has uncovered for Fenwick. But she is instructed to “accept service” of divorce papers intended for Fenwick and listing a number of her aliases. She is also instructed to “clam up” under police and press questioning and to fight extradition from Nevada to California.
Drake is also told to slip a “newspaper friend” $50 to take some pictures. The photographer is instructed to misrepresent who he is working for and say the pictures are for a newspaper story. The pictures are to be taken of a specific group of people in a very specific way.
Mason disguises the actual reason for the pictures to everyone. He wants to determine if any of the photographed people has a glass eye. Mason’s primary client, Brunold, is missing an eye. Brunold’s missing glass eye was found clutched in the hand of the murdered Hartley.
Harry calls Mason and discloses that he is staying in a specific room of a specific hotel under a specific fake name. Harry orders Mason to come, which he does. There he finds Harry murdered.
Mason plants one of the glass eyes Drake procured earlier in Harry’s dead hand. He then determines that the police have another surveillance operation under way. So, he engages in an elaborate ruse so that he appears to have a legitimate reason to be at the hotel. The ruse is also supposed to fool the police into believing he didn’t get to the murder scene first. The ruse succeeds so the police think they got to the murder scene before Mason did.
We then skip forward to the preliminary court hearing. Mason has arranged for the authorities to catch up with his Fenwick ringer just as the court proceedings are reaching a critical stage. Drake serves the divorce papers on her in Reno, but he thinks he has screwed up because the press and the authorities are lying in wait when he gets to her hotel room. He also appears to not recognize the ringer he found in the first place. (My best guess is that Drake’s failure to recognize her is just a continuity mistake on Gardner’s part.)
Burger accuses Mason of witness tampering and other unprofessional and perhaps illegal behavior. For instance, Mason has repeatedly instructed his fake Fenwick to “take the fifth”, which she does. Burger serves a subpoena to Mason in open court in the middle of the preliminary hearing on Harley’s murder. The subpoena directs Mason to appear before a Grand Jury and explain himself. Of course, things never get that far because everything is straightened out before the Grand Jury hearing can even be scheduled.
But this behavior gives Mason an opening to discourse in open court on his theory of the case. This permits him to get critical material introduced into the record that he might not otherwise have been able to.
A short time later in the presiding Judge’s quarters Mason is able to name the real murderer, James Overton. He has a military and police background and was hired by Hartley ostensibly as the chauffeur. He was actually there to spy on Hartley’s wife. In the course of his spying he learned and did things he shouldn’t have. He also has a glass eye.
He is killed in a shootout as he is trying to flee.
Overton was involved with Harry in the embezzlement scheme. So, all three bad guys, Hartley, Harry, and Overton end up dead. Justice triumphs and everything ends up tied up neatly into a bow.
***** End of the Summary of "The Case of the Counterfeit Eye"
I will not pretend this covers every development in the book. But it gives you enough to loosely follow the story. And it includes all of the Mason activities I find problematic.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Mason has a near-infallible lie detector. This gets a lot of use in this (and pretty much all the other) Mason stories. The story starts with his primary client telling what is obviously a lie. Mason must separate truth from fiction. Why would he even want such a client (other than the obvious reason that he is rich and is willing to pay Mason well)?
And what's Mason's proposed solution? To interfere with a legitimate investigation by planting false evidence. And he brings Drake onboard as an accomplice.
The second set of clients (the McLane siblings) fall into a similar category. They are up front about the fact that they want assistance in getting away with various crimes. And along the way they indicate that a third party, Hartley the soon to be murder victim, is up to his neck in criminality. And Mason's response is to promise to compound a felony. Compounding a felony is a crime and constitutes the highest level of unethical behavior by a lawyer.
And then there is the conflict of interest. Mason originally agrees to represent Brunold. Then he agrees to undertake legal duties for the McLanes, one of which is both a bad guy and gets murdered. But conveniently by this time Mason mostly confines himself to being in the sister's corner. And Mason is providing legal assistance to Sylvia and, at least to a modest extent, to Fenwick, Fenwick is eventually exposed as a "black widow" and a murderer. Fortunately (?), she doesn't murder any of the characters in this book.
Will the crimes ever cease? Nope! Traffic laws are broken. Since no one was harmed and Mason wasn't caught I suppose they don't count. But Mason is an accessory to the planting of evidence. He spirits a material witness away from the authorities. He councils someone to lie when being questioned. He is an accomplice to Drake using lock picks to "break and enter" a hotel room. He personally plants evidence at the scene of a crime after going to elaborate efforts to be in a position to do so. Specifically, he has Drake use deception to procure a cheap glass eye.
He seeks out and hires a woman so desperate she is willing to engage in unspecified illegal behavior. The fact that ultimately she does not have to do anything illegal doesn't mitigate the fact that Mason went out of his way to find someone so desperate that she was willing to do something illegal simply for the promise of a generous payoff. It was the middle of the Great Depression and lots of people were truly desperate. Mason has no compunction about taking advantage of this.
Everybody lies. Everybody schemes. No one seems to feel they are bound by the laws or the canons of ethics, judicial or otherwise. Everyone from a desperate woman to a newspaper photographer can be bought. In other Mason stories cops are "tipped" $20 for a favor and expensive cigars are delivered to the Office of the District Attorney in exchange for other favors.
Mason happily plays in this "law of the jungle" world. He is happy to do what it takes to get his client off. The final justification is that his client is innocent. The problem is that this kind of behavior on one side justifies similar behavior on the other side.
And in reading this or other Mason books it is startlingly obvious that all this activity takes place in a small club whose members consist of the entitled, their associates, and their employees. Mason couldn't do what he does if he didn't have a lot of money to throw around. The Fenwick ringer is paid $500, a fantastic amount of money at the time. Drake at one time says he has 20 operatives investigating something Mason is interested in. People fly back and forth to Reno, on one occasion in a chartered plane that is the "fastest one available". Air travel at that time was extremely expensive. And so it goes.
This can only happen if there is a small club of the rich and powerful who play by one set of rules while everyone else plays by different rules. Mason calls the cops and expects them to show up quickly, which they do. Why? Because he is calling from a rich man's house. The rich man employs a maid, secretary, and chauffeur that we know of. There are likely three or four full time staff around that fail to make an appearance. This is not "lifestyles of average folk". At this time most people didn't even own a car. Della Street, Mason's private secretary owns a fur coat but no car.
Only rich (and white) people have the time and resources with which to engage in as much bad behavior as we see on display here. One "rich adjacent" person manages to run up gambling debts amounting to almost $4,000. As I commented above, at the time this was roughly three times the annual salary of an ordinary person. (One person in the story is earning $70 per month and another person is earning $100 per month.)
All of Mason's actions are ultimately justified because his client actually is innocent and, therefore, being unjustly accused. That, and because Mason ultimately does expose what truly happened and who is truly guilty. And if in the real world everybody was rich and the government had nearly unlimited resources with which to investigate each crime (in this story two different surveillance operations are mounted with teams that in each case amounted to several people) then the kinds of rules on display here might possibly be appropriate.
But, as I indicated previously, that is rarely the case in the real world. In reality both sides are severely resource constrained. The cops would like to investigate more crimes and more thoroughly investigate the crimes they do investigate. The same is true of District Attorney's offices. They would like to throw more resources at more cases but they have a finite budget. So in both cases priorities are imposed that mean many cases are not investigated or are only superficially investigated. And most District Attorney's offices tend to focus on "slam dunk" cases while only occasionally taking on a complicated high profile case that might not be a slam dunk.
And the practical result is that complicated cases get short shrift. A potential defendant can make any case look complicated if he has the power and/or wealth to throw a lot of resources at it. So poor people get prosecuted because they don't have the resources to put up a serious fight. They may not even have bail money or money to pay traffic tickets on time.
Going after some poor schmuck who ran into a piece of bad luck is easy. Going after a rich SOB who will "fight you all the way to the Supreme Court" only rarely happens. It doesn't matter that the poor person's crime may amount to nothing and the rich person's crime may have horrific consequences.
This plays out all the time. People are still routinely jailed over small amounts of pot. Even in jurisdictions like the one I live in(Seattle) where pot is now legal, poor people are hassled for things like broken tail lights or parking in the wrong place or whatever. They committed the crime.
But pretty much no one involved in the Mortgage meltdown of several years ago went to jail. Yet banks foreclosed on mortgagors who were actually current on their payments. People were sold mortgages with terrible terms when they qualified for ones with much better terms. Bank fraud was uncovered. Junk securities were sold as investment grade when they weren't. And on and on and on. These crimes had awful consequences. But they were complicated and the cases were hard to win. The result in almost all cases was a decision to not bother prosecuting.
People like Michael Cohen make a very good living by using pit bull tactics against people of lesser means. The fact that people like Cohen routinely engage in illegal or unethical behavior normally results in no investigation and almost certainly in no sanctions. The rich and powerful look out for the rich and powerful. The rest of us are on our own.
And Mason definitely operated in the world of the rich and powerful. And he popularized many of the pit bull tactics that people like Michael Cohen used several generations later. In Mason's world these tactics were used against other members of the club. In the real world that never happens. People like Cohen and the people who employ people like Cohen don't go after other people like themselves. They go after people who are not sufficiently resourced to fight back. They know they will almost always win because the system is rigged to make sure they almost always win.
But if you want to see a Mason-like fight that is happening in the real world I do have a suggestion for you. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and multibillionaire, is going after the extremely well connected and very powerful millionaire David Pecker and the company he runs, AMI. Bezos has The Washington Post in his corner. Pecker has The National Inquirer in his corner. Now that's a contest where the fighters are much more evenly matched.
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