UX Movement – Why Headlines Attract More User Attention Than Images

When websites show content, they’ll usually use a headline and image. Headline and image quality is important in getting the user’s attention. However, the headline will always get the most attention no matter what. Here’s why.

Look at this image. How relevant is it to you? What is the context behind the image? One could make guesses all day, but the fact is that nobody knows for sure.

Now look at this headline. How relevant is it to you? What is the context behind the headline? You know what the context is immediately after reading it.

You can easily visualize the image with the headline alone. But you can’t make out the headline with the image alone. Users won’t understand the image without the headline. But users will still understand the headline without the image.

With the headline and image put together, users get the full picture. They get both the story context and the emotion.

When users see both together, they will naturally pay more attention to the headline because it has the context and details of a story that they can relate to. Users are looking for information, and a headline gives them more information than an image. However, the image can appeal to users’ emotions more. And that can reinforce the headline and give users the extra boost to click-through. Both are important, but the headline is most important.

Placement & Visual Weight

How can you apply this newfound insight to the way you design content? Since headlines attract more attention than images, you’ll want to place your headline before your image. This way users can immediately get to the headline without having to go through the image.

Putting the image first wastes an extra visual fixation that doesn’t give users any useful information.

The image is more meaningful to users after they understand the context from the headline first.

Another thing is to make sure that your image doesn’t have more visual weight than your headline. When an image is too large, users can easily get distracted. This slows them down from their task of getting information. To avoid this, balance the weight between your headlines and images, and let your headline do most of the talking.

When your image is louder than your headline, users waste their time staring at the image.

Replicated Research

If you’re still not convinced of the claim through objective reasoning, take a look at Jakob Nielson and the Poynter Institute’s research. Their studies “used different methodologies, tested different users and different sites, had different goals, and were conducted at very different stages of the growth of the Web” and they all concluded the same results. In Jakob’s own words:

When different people keep finding the same results year by year, it is time to take the findings seriously and to base Web design on the data and not on wishful thinking.

The results are in and the time to treat headlines with more respect is now. You may love looking at your image, but the user is looking at your headline.

New York Times – Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

…

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products.

But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

…

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

…

‘I Want a Glass Screen’

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

For over two years, the company had been working on a project — code-named Purple 2 — that presented the same questions at every turn: how do you completely reimagine the cellphone? And how do you design it at the highest quality — with an unscratchable screen, for instance — while also ensuring that millions can be manufactured quickly and inexpensively enough to earn a significant profit?

The answers, almost every time, were found outside the United States. Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China.

…

For [Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook], the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

The impact of such advantages became obvious as soon as Mr. Jobs demanded glass screens in 2007.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

In Foxconn City

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

…

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

…

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

But as that market has expanded, the bulk of Corning’s strengthened glass manufacturing has occurred at plants in Japan and Taiwan.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

Corning was founded in America 161 years ago and its headquarters are still in upstate New York. Theoretically, the company could manufacture all its glass domestically. But it would “require a total overhaul in how the industry is structured,” Mr. Flaws said. “The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

…

The American – What If Middle-Class Jobs Disappear?

…

There are two widely circulated narratives to explain what is going on. The Keynesian narrative is that there has been a major drop in aggregate demand. According to this narrative, the slump can be largely cured by using monetary and fiscal stimulus.

The main anti-Keynesian narrative is that businesses are suffering from uncertainty and over-regulation. According to this narrative, the slump can be cured by having the government commit to and follow a more hands-off approach.

I want to suggest a third interpretation. Without ruling out a role for aggregate demand or for the regulatory environment, I wish to suggest that structural change is an important factor in the current rate of high unemployment. The economy is in a state of transition, in which the middle-class jobs that emerged after World War II have begun to decline.

…

The Great Transition from 1930 to 1950

Between 1930 and 1950, the United States economy underwent a Great Transition. Demand fell for human effort such as lifting, squeezing, and hammering. Demand increased for workers who could read and follow directions. The evolutionary process eventually changed us from a nation of laborers to a nation of clerks.

The proportion of employment classified as “clerical and kindred workers” grew from 5.2 percent in 1910 to a peak of 19.3 percent in 1980. (However, by 2000 this proportion had edged down to 17.4 percent.)1 Overall, workers classified as clerical, professional workers, technical workers, managers, officials, and proprietors exceeded 50 percent of the labor force by 2000.

Corresponding declines took place in the manual occupations. Workers classified as laborers, other than farm or mine, peaked at 11.4 percent of the labor force in 1920 but were barely 6 percent by 1950 and less than 4 percent by 2000. Farmers and farm laborers fell from 33 percent of the labor force in 1910 to less than 15 percent by 1950 and only 1.2 percent in 2000.

The advent of the tractor and improvements in the factory rapidly reduced the demand for uneducated workers. By the 1930s, a marginal farm hand could not produce enough to justify his employment. Sharecropping, never much better than a subsistence occupation, was no longer viable. Meanwhile, machines were replacing manufacturing occupations like cigar rolling and glass blowing for light bulbs.2

World War II also demonstrated the increase in the relative importance of white-collar workers and machines. With all due respect to GI Joe and Rosie the Riveter, it could be that Cynthia the Clerk is a more appropriate symbol of the war effort, as logistics and communications came to be dominant factors. Although Winston Churchill famously praised “the few” who flew airplanes during the Battle of Britain, historians emphasize the role played by the communications and control systems on the ground, staffed to a considerable extent by women, in making the British victory possible. Female clerks also played a crucial role in the process of decoding German messages—the famous Enigma intercepts.

The structural-transition interpretation of the unemployment problem of the 1930s would be that the demand for uneducated workers in the United States had fallen, but the supply remained high. The high school graduation rate was only 8.8 percent in 1912 and still just 29 percent in 1931. By 1950, it had reached 59 percent.3 With a new generation of workers who had completed high school, the mismatch between skills and jobs had been greatly reduced.

What took place after the Second World War was not the revival of a 1920s economy, with its small farming units, urban manufacturing, and plurality of laborers. Instead, the 1950s saw the creation of a new suburban economy, with a plurality of white-collar workers. With an expanded transportation and communications infrastructure, businesses needed telephone operators, shipping clerks, and similar occupations. If you could read, follow simple instructions, and settle into a routine, you could find a job in the post-war economy.

The trend away from manual labor has continued. Even within the manufacturing sector, the share of production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing employment went from over 85 percent just after the Second World War to less than 70 percent in more recent years. To put this another way, the proportion of white-collar work in manufacturing has doubled over the past 50 years. On the factory floor itself, work has become less physically demanding. Instead, it requires more cognitive skills and the ability to understand and carry out well-defined procedures.

The Current Transition

As noted earlier, the proportion of clerical workers in the economy peaked in 1980. By that date, computers and advanced communications equipment had already begun to affect telephone operations and banking. The rise of the personal computer and the Internet has widened the impact of these technologies to include nearly every business and industry.

The economy today differs from that of a generation ago. Mortgage and consumer loan underwriters have been replaced by credit scoring. Record stores have been replaced by music downloads. Book stores are closing, while sales of books on electronic readers have increased. Data entry has been moved off shore. Routine customer support also has been outsourced overseas.

These trends serve to limit the availability of well-defined jobs. If a job can be characterized by a precise set of instructions, then that job is a candidate to be automated or outsourced to modestly educated workers in developing countries.

The result is what David Autor calls the polarization of the American job market. Autor and various research collaborators have documented a number of findings that reflect this polarization:4

• In recent decades, wage and employment growth have both been lowest at the middle segment of the skill distribution. Wage improvements have tended to be concentrated at the high end, and employment gains have tended to be largest at the low end of the skill distribution.

• This particular symptom of polarization is also prevalent in OECD countries other than the United States.

• In the United States, this polarization was exacerbated by the economic downturn. While both high- and low-skill jobs have held steady, the brunt of the recession has been borne by mid-skill workers. For example, growth in employment in sales was 54 percent from 1979 to 1989, 14 percent from 1989 to 1999, 4 percent from 1999 to 2007, and -7 percent from 2007 to 2009. Employment in sales was a key component of upward economic mobility after World War II, but technological change and globalization appear to have stalled or perhaps reversed this engine of middle-class affluence.

• From 1980 to 2007, real wages for male workers with only a high school degree fell by 12 percent, real wages of male workers with only a college degree rose by 10 percent, and real wages of males with post-graduate degrees increased by 26 percent. Female workers show a similar pattern, although wage gains were generally higher for females over this period.

Using the latest Census Bureau data, Matthew Slaughter found that from 2000 to 2010 the real earnings of college graduates (with no advanced degree) fell by more in percentage terms than the earnings of high school graduates. In fact, over this period the only education category to show an increase in earnings was those with advanced degrees.

The outlook for mid-skill jobs would not appear to be bright. Communication technology and computer intelligence continue to improve, putting more occupations at risk.

For example, many people earn a living as drivers, including trucks and taxicabs. However, the age of driver-less vehicles appears to be moving closer.

Another example is in the field of education. In the fall of 2011, an experiment with an online course in artificial intelligence conducted by two Stanford professors drew tens of thousands of registrants. This increases the student-teacher ratio by a factor of close to a thousand. Imagine the number of teaching jobs that might be eliminated if this could be done for calculus, economics, chemistry, and so on.

It is important to bear in mind that when we offer a structural interpretation of unemployment, a “loss of jobs” means an increase in productivity. Traditionally, economists have argued that productivity increases are a good thing, even though they may cause dislocation for some workers in the short run. In the long run, the economy does not run out of jobs. Rather, new jobs emerge as old jobs disappear. The story we tell is that average well-being rises, and the more that people are able to adapt, the more widespread the improvement becomes.

…

Three future scenarios

The most optimistic scenario is the one I consider least likely. Under this scenario, the supply of workers adapts to changes in technology. In particular, this means a future with relatively fewer workers whose skills are limited to following directions in well-defined jobs. Instead, more workers will have the cognitive ability, initiative, and self-discipline to constantly update their skills, adapt to new technology, and to participate in the creative part of creative destruction. Under this scenario, economic growth will be very high, and median earnings will also be high.

I do not believe that this optimistic scenario will emerge through more spending on education or even with education reform. My reading of the research is that variations in education techniques lead to differences in outcomes that tend to be small and transitory.6

If the optimistic scenario does arise, I suspect it will be the result of discoveries in biology. Perhaps pharmacology will succeed where pedagogy fails.

Turning to more realistic scenarios, I see the desirability of the outcome depending on the extent to which institutions serve to ameliorate problems created by disparities in ability. At one extreme, charities and government will develop humane, rational approaches for providing for the needs of people who are disadvantaged in an economic environment where rewards are concentrated among those who are disciplined, self-directed learners with creative gifts. At the other extreme, collective institutions will be arenas in which elites compete for resources, even when they claim to be fighting on behalf of the disadvantaged.

I would assess our current situation as closer to the adverse scenario. Our government is very responsive to cries for bank bailouts or to pleas for subsidies coming from well-connected companies, large (General Motors) and small (Solyndra). That same government is much less likely to target assistance in a charitable fashion.

Economist Steve Allen calculated that a $447 billion spending plan could be used to pay all 14 million unemployed workers $32,000 a year to take low-paying or volunteer jobs.7 While there may be no practical way to implement Allen’s approach, it does illustrate the deficiencies in existing stimulus proposals. Even according to the most optimistic estimates, these create or save many fewer jobs per dollar spent.

My guess is that the more power is concentrated in governmental units, the less likely it is that our collective institutions will be geared toward achieving outcomes that are charitable and make efficient use of resources. Trying to get large sums of tax money past the grabbing hands of rent-seeking elites will be like trying to get a stagecoach full of gold past a horde of armed robbers.

Government’s role as an employer and as a regulator is likely to exacerbate earnings inequality going forward. Government pay scales and contract award policies tend to place a very high weight on formal academic credentials. This increases the advantages of advanced degrees both directly and indirectly. The more that government requires educational credentials, the greater the rewards to the providers of educational credentials. Of course, becoming a provider of educational credentials requires obtaining high credentials oneself.

I suspect that a more decentralized set of voluntary collective institutions would achieve better results. People are less likely to donate to institutions that provide windfalls only to elites, so that such organizations would lose out in a competitive environment. I believe that a scenario in which many people have dignified jobs and enjoyable lifestyles is more likely to emerge in an environment with decentralized voluntary charities than one with concentrated, coercive government.

To put this another way, I think it is possible that technocrats will be able to come up with programs that offer decent work and reasonable incomes for workers with modest skills. However, I have more faith in a process in which technocrats must compete for charitable donations than a process in which they compete for government power.

The Atlantic – Mother of All Mothers

Kim Il Sung’s title Eobeoi Suryeong means not “Fatherly Leader”—a common rendering that encourages Martin to exaggerate the influence of Confucianism on the personality cult—but “Parent Leader,” the most feminine title the regime could get away with. As the country’s visual arts make clear, Kim was more a mother to his people than a stern Confucian patriarch: he is still shown as soft-cheeked and solicitous, holding weeping adults to his expansive bosom, bending down to tie a young soldier’s bootlaces, or letting giddy children clamber over him.

The tradition continues under Kim Jong Il, who has been called “more of a mother than all the mothers in the world.” His military-first policy may come with the title of general, but reports of his endless tour of army bases focus squarely on his fussy concern for the troops’ health and comfort. The international ridicule of his appearance is thus as unfair as it is tedious. Anyone who has seen a crowd of Korean mothers waiting outside an examination hall will have no difficulty recognizing Kim’s drab parka and drooping shoulders, or the long-suffering face under the pillow-swept perm: this is a mother with no time to think of herself.

When it comes to the Workers’ Party, the symbolism is even more explicit, as in this recent propaganda poem:

Ah, Korean Workers’ Party, at whose
breast only
My life begins and ends
Be I buried in the ground or strewn
to the wind
I remain your son, and again return to
your breast!
Entrusting my body to your
affectionate gaze,
Your loving outstretched hand,
I cry out forever in the voice of a child,
Mother! I can’t live without Mother!

It’s easy to imagine what Carl Jung would have made of all this, and he would have been right. Whereas Father Stalin set out to instill revolutionary consciousness into the masses (to make them grow up, in other words), North Korea’s Mother Regime appeals to the emotions of a systematically infantilized people. Although the propaganda may seem absurd at a remove, it speaks more forcefully to the psyche than anything European communism could come up with. As a result, North Korea’s political culture has weathered the economic collapse so well that even refugees remain loyal to the memory of Kim Il Sung.

…

It would appear that Kim knows just enough. The border with China remains so porous that even children often sneak back and forth, and yet no more than three or four percent of the population has chosen to flee for good. The regime obviously did the smart thing by publicly acknowledging the food shortage and then blaming it on American sanctions, instead of pretending there was no food shortage at all, as Stalin used to do.

The Dear Leader has also deftly exploited the tradition according to which Koreans care for their parents in old age: the masses are told that it is their job to feed him, not the other way around, and his famed diet of “whatever the troops are eating” is routinely invoked to shame everyone into working harder. Never has a dictator been such an object of pity to his people, or such a powerful source of guilt. In 2003 North Korean cheerleaders, living it up on a rare visit to a sports event in the South, responded to a rain-soaked picture of Kim by bursting into a hysterical lament that baffled their hosts.

…

Kim must also be aware that the infantilization of the people has come at a price. Away from Pyongyang’s carefully monitored tourist sites, North Korea is a much more raucous place than any dictator could be comfortable with. “One surprising thing,” Michael Breen writes in Kim Jong Il: North Korea’s Dear Leader (2004), “surprising because you expect robots, is … how frequently fights break out.” According to refugees, even women fight out their differences, and young female teachers are said to hit children the hardest.

This lack of restraint is a problem for many North Koreans trying to adjust to life in the South. Social workers complain that the refugees pick fights with strangers, and storm off jobs on the first day. “I’d have thought they’d be better at controlling themselves, coming from a socialist system,” is a common lament.

Rolling Stone – In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Guyana After the Jonestown Massacre

The others were already in Guyana. Stuck in the Miami airport, through no fault of my own, I paced. I was a journalist, a ghoul, with a desire to go where no sane man would wish to go. A smiling woman with large, syrupy eyes tried to pin a candy cane on my shirt. She explained that the Hare Krishnas were feeding people all over the world, and she had this record album and a book and a magazine – “Like, it’s rully ecstatic” – and would I like to cough up a donation.

“Doesn’t this Jonestown stuff make you wonder about yourself?” I asked.

“What?” She looked up at me in shock.

“Selfless commitment,” I began.

“It’s the oldest… ”

“They killed the babies first,” I said.

“… religion in the world. We have… ”

“Potassium cyanide.”

“… members in all… ”

“Dead,” I said. “Men, women, children, old, young, black, white… ”

Her eyes glazed over and she turned from me, walking rapidly in the general direction of the United Airlines ticketing desk. I followed along after her, the way so many of them had hounded my steps over the years in airports all over America.

“They were people who couldn’t look into themselves,” I insisted. “Good people. People who fed the hungry. Who helped others. And now they’re lying out there in that goddamn jungle… ”

She stepped up her pace.

“… swollen. Grotesque. Nothing more than thirty or forty tons of rotting meat.”

She ran from me, her bag full of magazines and albums thumping against her hip. I felt both ashamed and full of fierce, brutal joy. There were a dozen of them at least, between concourse A and concourse H, and I got every one. All you had to do was “Jonestown” them and they fled like rats.

While I was raging through the Miami airport, Tim Chapman, a husky twenty-eight-year-old photographer for the Miami Herald, was doing some of the best work of his life. In Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, he had talked his way onto a flight to Jonestown, where the bodies still lay, three days after the massacre that culminated in the death of more than 900 members of the Reverend Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple.

From the helicopter it looked as if there were a lot of brightly colored specks around the main building. At 300 feet the smell hit. The chopper landed on a rise, out of sight of the bodies. Other reporters tied handkerchiefs over their faces. Chapman didn’t have one, so he used a chamois rag. It turned out to be a good idea.

Chapman was telling me all this about three in the morning the day I arrived in Georgetown. He wasn’t drinking, but his words slipped out in slurry bursts. He hadn’t been able to sleep much.

“The first body I saw,” he said, “was off to the side, alone. Five more steps and I saw another and another and another; hundreds of bodies. The Newsweek reporter was walking around saying, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ Another guy said, ‘It’s unreal.’ Then nobody even attempted to speak anymore. It was overwhelming. Bizarre.”

Chapman talked about how he kept moving, shooting wide-angle shots of the hundreds of bodies. “There were colors everywhere: raincoats and shirts and pants in reds and greens and blues; bright, happy colors.” Chapman saw two parrots on a fence, a red and yellow macaw and a blue and yellow macaw. He moved around to get that angle: the contrast of life and death.

“I started moving to my left,” Chapman said. “And I was battered by the smell. It hit me. Went right into my chest. I started to gag, and turned my back. Seeing it, plus the smell… ” He wadded the chamois into his mouth, bit down, got some saliva into it and tasted the leather. That helped some. “Then, I found if I kept my eyes moving and let my camera be my eyes, I’d never really see it. I shot verticals and horizontals, moving to my left. And then there it was.” Chapman shrugged helplessly. “There were piles upon piles of bodies. What do you call it? There’s no definition. Nothing to compare it to.”

Outside our hotel, a tropical rain battered the windows. Inside, an air conditioner cranked up to full-high howled mechanically. The bodies, Chapman said, were in grotesque disfigurement. One woman’s false teeth had been pushed out. He saw a child, maybe five years old, between a man and woman who were swollen in death. He remembered that the child wore brown pants and a blue shirt. He wasn’t as swollen as the man and woman. The children didn’t seem to swell as much. Just for a moment Chapman stood there, hating the parents. They had a choice and the child didn’t.

When the other reporters left for Jones’ house Chapman decided to stay with the bodies, and he moved through them alone. He stopped for a moment, and in the stillness, he heard a body working. “It was … gurgling. And it came from a black woman in a red shirt with viva written across the front. She wore gold earrings and she was arm and arm with a black man. Her head was swollen to the size of a bowling ball. Her eyes had popped completely out of her head. The entire eyeball was resting outside the socket.” Chapman paused. “It didn’t bother me then,” he said. “I knew it would get to me in a few days.

“This is going to change my life,” Chapman said softly. He lost the thread of his thought momentarily and his eyes went blank. In Vietnam, they called it the 1000-yard stare.

I waited for a while, then asked. “What else?”

“Okay. I moved to my left. There was a vat and then I saw Jones. As I moved toward him, I got a real bad whiff. I stepped away, almost tripped on a body, stumbled to get my balance, and as soon as I bent down, I was suddenly too close to one. There was a tremendous adrenalin shot, a fear.” He had then stepped back and tried to tell himself that he had to go on, that he was an instrument of history.

“It was really sickening at this point. The bodies were all, well, they were oozing – literally. Fluids running out of the bodies on top of bodies. Some of them had guts hanging out. They had burst in the heat. Eyeballs, intestines, bodies virtually held in by clothing. Somehow it all reminded me of Salvador Dali’s Resurrection of the Flesh. Did you ever see that? And I thought, ‘What I’m doing here is a form of art.”‘

Chapman told me he saw seven needles. One was sticking out of a man’s neck. Another was totally bent, as if it had been shoved into someone or something with a lot of force. There was about half an inch of milky fluid in the syringe.

There were some dogs that had been shot and some dead cats. Chapman decided not to photograph them. He thought there were a lot of sick people in the world who would be more angry about them than “this mind-boggling, nihilistic thing, this questioning of the very value of human life.”

Chapman chose not to shoot any photos of Jones. It had been done, and besides, he felt that somehow any more photos would glorify the man. He never got closer than fifteen feet to Jones. “He was wearing a red dress shirt and it looked to me as if it had burst open because of the swelling. From where I stood, it looked as if he wore a soaked white T-shirt. Either that or his skin was bulging out, because you could tell it was holding in liquids and goo.

“His head was all blown out of proportion. There was a wound under his right ear and it was oozing. One arm was up over his head, stiff in rigor mortis. The skin was stretched tight over the hand, and it looked desperate, like a claw.”

There was something else, something about the arrangement of the bodies that struck Chapman. Jones was on his back. Most of the others were face down, their heads pointing to Jones. “I could tell,” Chapman said, “that it wasn’t their final statement. It was Jones’.”

Somehow that single thought was the most terrifying thing Chapman said that morning.

The Park Hotel is a big, faded, white, four-story frame building surrounded by palms. Someone in the Guyanese government had decided to put all the survivors of the massacre on the same floor with the survivors of the Port Kaituma ambush (during which Representative Leo Ryan of California and four others were murdered; he had traveled to Guyana at the request of some constituents, who were troubled about relatives living in Jonestown).

On the second floor of the Park is a large ballroom. A white ribbed dome rises some seventy feet above the floor where there are a dozen or so tables with three or four chairs apiece. Just under the dome is a balcony, which leads to the rooms. The ballroom is open to the wind on three sides. A white wooden railing keeps inebriated guests from stumbling off the floor and plummeting into the gardenias below. In deference to the periodic downpours that last an hour or more, there is a green metal awning, hung with pots of various tropical flowers and ferns. I thought of the place as the Graham Greene room.

Guyanese soldiers stood about conspicuously. Reporters occupied most of the tables. The survivors were confined to the third floor, sometimes two, three and four to a small, un-air-conditioned room. They were forced to leave their doors and windows open for the breeze, and they lay sweating under yellowing canopies of mosquito netting. When they couldn’t stand the rooms anymore, they came down to the ballroom, where the reporters swarmed around them like hungry locusts on a single ear of corn.

One afternoon a steel-drum band called the Pegasus Sound Wave took the stage and played lilting versions of popular songs. The musicians wore red baseball caps and enjoyed their own music. They liked Christmas carols in particular, and smiled and laughed their way through “Jingle Bells” and “Jolly Old Saint Nick” several times, to the obvious delight of the local crowd.

Off to the side, over bottles of Banks beer, the survivors talked to reporters. You’d hear the most heart-wrenching, bloody awful details – “Part of her skull landed in my lap”; “… lost five children out there… “; “My child was dead, and my wife was dying” – over the din of laughter and applause and Christmas carols.

It began to rain, cooling the room. Rain hammered on the awning, then let up. The sun burst through, and its light glittered on the wet palms swaying in the trade winds.

The survivors, some of them children, stared at the reporters with vacant, ancient eyes. There were literally hundreds of journalists from at least five continents in Georgetown. It was madness. Virulent lunacy. And when you tried to assemble bits and pieces of the story, none of it fit together. There was no perspective, no center.

And so we assaulted the survivors in the Graham Greene room at the Park. There were three distinct groups. First came the voices of dissent: those who had gone with Congressman Ryan and survived the shoot-out at Port Kaituma. This group included the Bogue family, the Parks family and Harold Cordell. They hated Jones and Jonestown. The press counted them as the most reliable sources.

The second group consisted of those who had escaped the carnage at Jonestown. Odell Rhodes and Stanley Clayton made up half of the total number. Both were articulate, both had witnessed the final moments.

On Saturday, the third group – Tim Carter, 30, his younger brother, Mike, and Mike Prokes, 31 – came walking up the steps of the Park to the Graham Greene room. Both Tim Carter and Mike Prokes had held leadership positions in Jones’ organization. They were accompanied by several Guyanese soldiers, and they looked terribly frightened.

They sat at one of the tables and the press pounced. Lights, cameras, microphones, tape recorders, half a dozen people shouting out questions. Tim Carter, in particular, fascinated me. It was his eyes. He looked like a beaten fighter in the fifteenth round, one who just caught a stiff right cross he never saw coming. Tim Carter was a beaten man, and his eyes had the watery, glazed and unfocused look of a boxer who can no longer defend himself and who is simply going to absorb punches until he falls.

“I heard a lot of screaming,” Carter said, his voice breaking, “and I went up to the pavilion and the first thing I saw was that my wife and child were dead. I had a choice of staying there,” he continued, close to tears, “and I left. And these people [referring to the dissenters who had lived through Port Kaituma] are saying we are after them and it is ridiculous.”

We had heard a remarkably similar story from the dissenting survivors. Jim Jones had promised that anyone who left Jonestown would be tracked down and killed. And yet, leaders of the organization had left in the midst of the suicides. They had with them a suitcase containing $500,000 in American currency.

“The money was given to us by one of the secretaries,” Prokes said. He identified Maria Katsaris, a top aide and mistress to Jones. “She said, ‘Things are out of control. Take this.’ We left. The money was in a suitcase.”

Prokes and the Carters said they were running for their lives, and the suitcase was too heavy so they buried it. When they arrived at Port Kaituma, they told the police about the suitcase and took them to it.

“You saw your wife and child take poison?” someone asked Tim Carter. His eyes swam. “I didn’t see them take poison. My baby was dead. My wife was dying. I’m trying to forget about it. Everything you thought you believed in, everything you were working for was a lie, it was, it was… a lie.

“All I can say is that it was a nightmare, a nightmare. [The Carters and Mike Prokes had gone back to help identify bodies.] It was the most grotesque thing I’ve ever seen. We were there two days later and I couldn’t even recognize people I’d known for six years.”

Prokes said, “We’ve all lost loved ones. We feel we’ve been more than cooperative. We would like to be alone for a while.” They got up and sat by themselves at a far table. I saw one reporter label his tape punks.

The band was still playing Christmas carols. I bought a beer and watched the “punks” from across the room. They were constantly checking the position of the Guyanese soldiers, and, I imagined, looking for an escape route. They feared the dissenting survivors and felt they might be killed because of the nature of their escape and their leadership positions. They refused to go to their rooms on the third floor. Escape routes there were limited.

So the “punks” were forced to stay in the Graham Greene room. Despite their wishes, reporters would still try to sit with them. When this happened, it triggered another rush of cameras and microphones. “The circumstances were different,” Tim Carter said for the fourth or fifth time. “We were asked to leave. We were given a suitcase and told to take it to the embassy. I heard crying and screaming. And I went up, like I said, and I saw my wife and son… please, I don’t want to talk about it.”

But they had little choice. As long as they stayed in the Greene room, one reporter, bolder than the rest, would approach them, and it would start all over again. I was reminded of the way a bitch weans her puppies. She may be sleeping when they waddle over and begin to suckle. Annoyed, she gets up and walks to the far side of the room. The puppies regard one another in dismay. Soon enough, one, bolder than the rest, waddles over to mother. The others, fearing that they won’t get their fair share, make a mad comic dash.

And so it was with Prokes and the Carters. Through the carols and the rain and the moments of sunshine, we all stopped at their table to suckle more information. The letter to the embassy, for instance. The one in the suitcase with the money. It was addressed to the Soviet embassy. Mike Carter explained, “Jones told us the Soviet Union supported liberation movements.”

The bits and pieces wouldn’t fit. It was like trying to hold too many ball bearings in one hand. Every time you got something, everything else you had threatened to clatter to the floor and roll out of reach.

Odell Rhodes is a soft-spoken, articulate thirty-six-year-old, an eyewitness to the first twenty minutes of the massacre at Jonestown. The first time we met, he spotted a forty-ounce duty-free bottle of Jack Daniel’s in my case. We drifted up to my room, where it was quieter.

We sipped the bourbon, strong and sweet and straight, out of Park Hotel water glasses. Odell had been a junkie for ten years. He’d been through two drug-treatment programs, and both times he had gone back to drugs and some sleazy hustle on the street. “They tell you an addict shoots junk because he likes it,” Odell said. “I never liked it. I had to shoot it.”

The Detroit street scene got more and more sordid. Once a lady friend of his dropped by with some drugs. “She liked to take it in the neck,” Odell said. “I used to hit her.” But this time Odell missed her by five minutes. Someone else had hit her up, and it turned out that the drugs were bad. When Odell found her, she was dead, the needle sticking out of her neck. “Five more minutes,” Odell said, “and I would have hit her up and killed her. Probably killed myself too.”

Odell was down and out, ashamed even to see his family. Once he was in jail on traffic violations, sick, wondering where he was going to get bail, knowing there were no drugs for him that night. Dozing, he felt someone “messing with my foot.” It turned out to be a white businessman. The man explained that he had this thing for feet. If Odell would just let him sort of… fool around … the guy would pay his bail the next day. So Odell lay there in the dark, weak and sick, while some guy drooled over his feet.

“I hated being an addict,” Odell said.

When the Peoples Temple buses came through Detroit, an alcoholic friend decided to join. The next time they came through, the friend looked up Odell. The friend was dry, sharp, well dressed. “He looked like a successful businessman,” Odell said. And Odell, who had failed twice trying to kick his habit, decided to check out the temple.

Jim Jones, he said, gave him a new self-image. He was intelligent. He was useful. Odell was given a job in the San Francisco temple. “The area it was in,” he said, “was like where I had come from in Detroit. But I could walk down the street with money in my pocket and pass it all up.”

When Odell first arrived in Guyana, things seemed fine. His job was teaching crafts to children, and he was good at it. He’d spend hours pouring over books, looking for projects children could complete in a couple of hours. The kids teased him – “Hey that’ll never work, man” – and he’d bet them cookies that it would. They laughed a lot.

The children would throw their arms around Odell and call him “Daddy.” He was worried about that at first. Jim Jones was Daddy. Jim Jones was Father. But the leaders in the organization appreciated his efforts. Odell, they said, was providing a stable image for the youngsters. His estimation of his own worth soared.

“I really loved those kids,” he told me.

But then things started going sour in Jonestown. The food deteriorated. The workdays increased. It seemed, to Odell’s experienced eye, that Jim Jones was developing a serious drug problem. Crazy things began to happen, and he made plans to escape.

Odell had been to Vietnam, and attended something they called “hunt and kill” school. It was said that no one could survive in the jungle around Jonestown. Armed members of the temple’s security squad combed the roads and trails. Escapees were invariably caught. And punished. Odell figured he could steal one of the camp’s crossbows. He’d hide it in the bush, then make off with it the next morning, before anyone noticed that he was missing. He’d stay off the roads and trails, hiding in the bush and living off the land until he was presumed dead.

But then the news of Congressman Ryan’s visit hit Jonestown. Security was increased. Then came the incident at Port Kaituma, followed by the terrible night of screams in which more than 900 died. The children were first. Odell watched Larry Schact, Jonestown’s doctor, measure poison into a syringe. Nurses squirted the liquid into children’s mouths. Some of them were brought to Odell. He was their daddy, and they died in his arms.

“I watched them die,” he said. “And I haven’t cried yet. It’s like I’m dead inside. Sometimes, I’m alone in my room, and I close the door and I wait to cry. Water comes to my eyes, but I can’t cry.”

Odell sipped at the bourbon and blinked several times.

It was a massive job, loading up all the corpses at Jonestown, and it took eight full days. On the ninth day, the government allowed about fifty news ghouls into the jungle enclave. We flew up to Matthews Ridge and were ferried the twenty or so miles to the ghost town in one helicopter accommodating twelve. There was a dash to be on the first flight. TV crews claimed they should get preference, because they needed the light. Newspaper reporters were shouting, “Fuck that TV shit. I have to see, too.” The boarding process looked like a Tokyo subway at rush hour. It was, all in all, a shameful disgrace that led several young Guyanese soldiers to laugh out loud.

At 1000 feet, the jungle seemed like a vast, gently undulating sea: forty shades of green stretched as far as the eye could see. And it was literally steaming: mist rose up from the low-lying areas and from the sluggish, tea-colored rivers. It was awesome, frightening, and my guess is that every reporter on the chopper, reminded of Joseph Conrad’s descriptions of the jungle, scribbled Heart of Darkness in their notes, as I did.

We landed on the rise Tim Chapman had mentioned, walked down a dirt path through a neatly mowed lawn, crossed a gracefully arched wooden bridge over a turgid brown river, passed several wooden buildings on stilts and made our way to the pavilion, where the bodies had lain.

Everything was ironic. The last bodies to be removed had been in such a state of decomposition that bits and pieces kept falling off. Guyanese workers were plowing the whole area under, using tractors that had belonged to the people, bits and pieces of whom were being plowed under.

To get to the pavilion proper, we had to step across muddy rills, and the thought of that ocher-colored mud clinging to our shoes was unpleasant. The pavilion had a corrugated metal roof set on wooden columns and a hard-packed mud floor. Tractors had not yet been inside. The smell was bad, and several of us gagged. In front of the stage, along with a collection of musical instruments, were several bits of gore: blackened flesh, shriveled skulls, all crawling with flies. On the walls were signs that said LOVE ONE ANOTHER, and the like. Red rubber gloves were lying about, dozens of sheets of papers reading, “Instructions for use; bag, plastic mortuary,” mementos of the American graves detail.

I found a notebook containing “notes on the news,” which consisted of a recapitulation of Soviet space triumphs and details of repressive actions taken by reactionary, American-supported governments around the world. The notebook must have been in among a pile of bodies, because it stank of rotten meat, and I got that stink on my hands.

A soldier pointed out a pile of crossbows. They were Wham-O Powermasters, set on wooden rifle stocks. The arrows were short, lethal, razor-tipped. Forty guns had been found, but the soldiers wouldn’t let us see them.

A short walk across the mud ended at a wooden cage with a corrugated metal roof and sign reading Mr. Muggs. Jones had started off in the Midwest as “the monkey preacher,” selling imported monkeys door to door. He loved animals and the temple was always taking in strays. Mr. Muggs, the Jonestown chimpanzee mascot, had been shot in the back of the head. Patches of blackened fur littered the cage floor.

The path led down a shallow slope to Jones’ house, a brown, wood affair, slightly larger than the rest, surrounded by tangerine and almond trees. The place was locked up, but scattered on the porch was Jim Jones’ mail, a collection of books and magazines, and his medicine cabinet: three things that reveal much about a man.

The books and magazines were about conspiracies, spies, political imprisonment, people who manipulate the news and Marxism. A large red book contained dozens of Russian posters; one showed Lenin speaking before a crowd of workers.

Near a footlocker full of health foods and vitamins, I found hundreds of Valium tablets, some barbiturate-type pills and several disposable syringes, along with ampuls of synthetic morphine. Next to the drugs, by a pile of blank Guyanese power-of-attorney forms, was a great stack of letters addressed “to Dad.” Most were labeled “self-analysis” and began with “I feel guilty because… ” The self-analysis letters were confessions. No one admitted to being happy and well adjusted.

I read one from a young male: “I am sexually attracted to a lot of brothers and would rather fuck one in the ass than get fucked.” After the original confession, the letters churned with hate. “I have feelings about going to the States for revenge against people.” From an eighty-nine-year-old woman: “Dear Dad, I would rather die than go back to the States as there is plenty of hell there. I would give my body to be burned for the cause than be over there… If I had to go back, I would like to have a gun and use it [she names several temple defectors who worked with the anti temple Human Freedom Movement] and have them all in a room together and take a gun and spray the row of them. I am glad to have a Dad and Father like you… ”

Some letters seemed to be answers to questions posed by Jones, one of which concerned the writer’s estimation of his ability to stand up under torture. The answers suggested that people felt that kidnapping and torture were very real possibilities. Most doubted that they could endure continual physical pain.

The letters were chilling, suggesting lives filled with guilt and hate, and fear. More frightening was the tone of absolute submission to Dad, a man who, by all evidence, seemed to be a hypochondriac, a drug addict and paranoid.

The soldiers clapped their hands and we were told to move along. No one wanted to leave the mother lode outside Jones’ house. Everyone wanted to scribble down just one more letter or the name on just one more ampul of amber-colored drugs. Soldiers nudged one or two of us with their rifles.

We were shown a bakeshop, a machine shop, a brick-making area. We noted packets of a Kool Aid-like drink called Flavoraid lying around. The illustration showed two children sipping Fla*vor*aid and smiling happily. There were shoes in the mud and on the grass and in the fields. A disproportionate number were children’s shoes, sandals no bigger than the palm of your hand.

Across from the rise where the helicopter landed were forty or so cottages, painted in pleasant pastels. They were maybe twelve-by-twenty-four feet. Several doors were open, and we could see beds jammed together. The cottages seemed to be for sleep and sleep alone.

A guard tower stood above the cottages. Strangely, it wasn’t near the roads in and out of Jonestown, but was directly over the area where most of the people lived. Someone had painted several bright seascapes on the tower, so that it appeared to be a contradiction of itself, like a .357 Magnum disguised as a candy cane.

As we stood on the rise waiting for the helicopter and looking down on the cottages, a rainbow began to form in the distance. It grew more brilliant. A second bow formed above the first, and together they stretched across the sky, encompassing the whole of Jonestown.

A soldier said the Guyanese might continue the communal agricultural experiment Jones began. We wondered who could work there, what kind of men and women would be required to spend their nights in those awful, empty cottages. Someone else said that the Guyanese had considered making Jonestown a tourist attraction. A tourist attraction? What would they call it? Club Dead?

Later, back in Georgetown, I asked dissident survivor Harold Cordell about the guard tower with those painted yellow fish swimming all over it. He told me they had placed a wind-driven generator on top, but it had never worked. Finally, they had installed children’s slides on the lower level. The guard tower was called the playground.

The whole process – this denial of the tower’s function – reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984, in which the Party re-forms language in such a way as to make “heretical thought” impossible. The language is called Newspeak and makes abundant use of euphemisms. In Newspeak, a forced labor camp is called a “joycamp.” The guard tower at Jonestown was the architectural equivalent of Newspeak.

Jonestown itself had become a joycamp in its last year. There was no barbed wire around the perimeter. It wasn’t needed. Escape was a dream. The jungle stretched from horizon to horizon, thick, swampy and deadly. Armed security guards patrolled the few trails, and it was their business to know where an escapee would look for food and water. Rumor had it that captured escapees had had their arms broken. Toward the end, most of them were simply placed in the euphemistically named Extra Care Unit, where they were drugged senseless for a week at a time. Patients emerged from ECU unable to carry on a conversation, and their faces were blank, as if they had been temporarily lobotomized.

They were told that even if they could survive the jungle, elude the guards and somehow make it almost 150 miles to Georgetown, they’d be stuck there. The temple held their passports as well as any money they might have had when they arrived.

[The Party] systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty. – ’1984′

It happened that way with Dale Parks, one of the men who tried to leave with Congressman Ryan. He had quit the church for some months, but Jones’ wife, Marceline, had convinced him to come back and give Jonestown a try. He was given a round-trip ticket, which he was required to turn over, along with his passport, “for safekeeping.” Almost immediately he was “forced” to write letters to his family about how wonderful it all was. “I saw the guns around,” he told me, “and I didn’t want it to come to that.”

Parks’ family believed the letters and followed him to Jonestown. Soon after arriving, his father, Gerry, who had a stomach condition, mentioned that the food didn’t agree with him. During that night’s Peoples Forum meeting, in which “problems” were discussed, Gerry Parks was called up “on the floor.” Jones humiliated him in front of the community, gathered in the pavilion. “How can you complain about the food,” Jones raged. “You, with a full belly, when two out of three babies in the world go hungry.” Dale then watched his father being beaten.

When Jones called people on the floor, Dale Parks said, relatives were expected to confront them first. Defending a father, mother or child could result in a beating. The family itself was expected to dispense the most vitriolic criticism. When the Parkses found themselves together (as when they were forced to write glowing letters home), they would whisper furtively: “You know I have to do it. If I’m on the floor, you do it too. I still love you.”

Every citizen… could be kept… under the eyes of the police… – ’1984′

There were informers everywhere. They got time off, extra food, extra privileges, sometimes even a pat on the back from Father. Children informed on their parents, parents on children. Senior citizens were prized as informers. In rare moments of privacy, one resident might express “negative” opinions to another. It was unwise to reply with anything but criticism of such ideas. The person might be an informer, and any agreement would put you on the floor and result in a beating.

The aftermath of a beating used to be called “discipline,” but the name was changed to the more euphemistic “public service.” People in public service were transferred to a dorm patrolled by armed guards. They did double work duty, and food might be withheld if they didn’t give their all. Security people would stop by the dorm to administer a beating. Often people in public service were allowed to sleep for an hour or two, then were roughly wakened and made to do some tedious chore, such as washing walls.

The only way to get out of public service was to express regret for your previous attitude, to pretend to like the work, to display a “good attitude.” It did something to a man’s mind, public service.

Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting operation, like having an enema… It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control… sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship. – ’1984′

It had been pretty rough for Stanley Clayton in Oakland. He started stealing at the age of eight, and the only presents in the house on Christmas were the ones he stole. Clayton was originally attracted to the temple because the women he met there were warm and “foxy.” Later, he came to share a vision of economic and social equality. On the boat from Georgetown to Jonestown, he met a young, female temple member. They talked about how they were home for the first time: home in a socialist country with black leaders. They were finally free.

The woman expressed her freedom by sleeping with one of the sailors. The boat’s captain told Jones about it, and the second night Stanley was in Jonestown, the woman was called on the floor. The question was put to her: “Why did you do it?” She answered, “Well, because Stanley said I’m free.” The community turned on him, shouting invectives. He was knocked to the ground, where security guards, trained in martial arts, shoved him and shouted at him and threw punches.

According to Stanley, Jones frequently railed against sex in marathon meetings. He said it was unhealthy and shortened the life span. When a married man was discovered having an affair, the two were called on the floor and made to strip to their underwear and pretend to make love – there on the floor in front of the man’s wife. Jones used the opportunity to denigrate sex altogether. “Look at them,” he said. “They’re like animals.”

When Stanley had sex with an older woman, both were called on the floor. “They beat the shit out of us,” Stanley said.

At Jonestown, you didn’t have a lover, you had a companion. One day Stanley’s longtime companion told him it was over. “The way she told me,” he said, “I knew it was put upon her.” At one meeting, Jones’ wife told Stanley’s companion to sit by the doctor. “At that time,” Stanley said, “Jim Jones tried to humiliate me, calling me all kinds of names. ‘See what sex can do for you,’ he said. ‘Your companion is off somewhere else.’ He even tried to humiliate her by saying all she wanted was a dick. He said, measuring a small space with his hands, ‘Stanley’s dick ain’t no bigger than that.”‘

[A Party member] is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors… the discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards. – ’1984′

The public-address system was sometimes on all night, the survivors explained, so that people could learn in their sleep. At six a.m., someone knocked on the door. Breakfast consisted of rice, watery milk and brown sugar. Promptly at seven, a typical resident reported to work in the field, which might be as much as a mile and a half away. A supervisor took his name, and the list was given to security. It seemed as if the weeds grew back to choke the crops in a single day, and workers were required to do heavy weeding in temperatures that often rose well above 100 degrees.

There was a half-hour break for lunch. Most often, the midday meal was a bowl of rice soup.

The workday ended at six p.m. A resident had less than two hours to walk back from the fields, shower and eat dinner, which usually consisted of rice and gravy and wild greens. At 7:45, the public-address system began blasting out “the news.”

Jim Bogue took an adult education course from Jim Jones in Ukiah, California. At the time, Jones didn’t believe in tests. In Jonestown, he gave one or two tests every week, and if you did poorly, you might end up on the floor. Sometimes Jones would read and interpret the news, sometimes another voice would supply his interpretation. The news outlined repressive measures taken by the South African government, and it implicated the United States. Tortures in Chilean prisons were described.

Jones became more and more radical in his opinions. Charles Manson was misunderstood. The Red Brigades, who kidnapped and eventually murdered President Aldo Moro of Italy, had done a good thing. People took notes, dreading the tests.

About nine p.m., it was time for Russian class. Such phrases as “Good day, comrade,” were practiced for an hour and a half. People paid attention, because supposedly they would someday visit Russia, a “paradise on earth” where the government “helped liberation movements.”

At about eleven p.m., the community could knock off and fall exhausted into bed. Unless there were problems (and there were problems on the average of three times a week), at which point Jones would sit on his “throne” and ask leaders to describe them. Complaints about the food were always dealt with harshly. There were maggots in the rice, and you either ate in the light and picked them out or, if too exhausted, sat in the dark and ate a lot of maggots.

Jones’ answer to the problem with the inferior rice had something to do with the CIA. They couldn’t allow an interracial socialist experiment to flourish. And to complain about the food was to fall into the CIA’s hands, to be in league with them, to be a traitor.

Beatings were often severe enough to require a stay in the infirmary. People wept uncontrollably on the floor as they confessed their crimes and negative attitudes. Some were whipped with a leather belt. Jones encouraged senior citizens to strike others with their canes. Victims lay unconscious on the ground until coming to, at which time they were expected to apologize to the community at large.

The Peoples Forum meetings might last until three a.m. Undernourished and exhausted, people took their three hours of dead, dreamless sleep.

In her opinion, the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily… were probably fired by the government… itself, just to keep people frightened.” – ’1984′

Jim Jones said he was in constant danger. And he felt it was necessary the community know this. Once, he informed them that a curse had been put on his life. He confiscated all the children’s dolls and later, burned a passport onstage. He said the passport belonged to the traitor who put the curse on him. The next day, an old man was found dead. Some of the survivors believed the old man died the day before and that Jones took the opportunity to display his omnipotence.

Sometimes, Jones would stumble and slur his words onstage. He’d go back to his cottage for an hour, somehow collect himself and return full of fire. One day he stumbled out of his house in pain. He’d been poisoned. An infiltrator, a traitor or the CIA had gotten to his food. Jones managed to heal himself.

In September 1977, shots were fired at Jones from the bush. They were real shots. Tim Carter, who was standing with Jones, swears to it. The shots were said to come from mercenaries, mercenaries hired by the Human Freedom Movement (the Berkeley group of temple defectors). The Human Freedom Movement, Jones told the community, was funded by the CIA. They were out there, in the bush. He could hear their military vehicles, could see white men in uniforms at the tree line, hear them on the shortwave radio.

It seemed absurd on the face of it. Mercenaries, hired by the shadowy hand of the CIA, make their way to Jonestown, level their sophisticated weapons, take one shot, and miss? Jim Bogue and Harold Cordell concluded that the shots were “self-inflicted,” that they were fakery and theater.

Nevertheless, the atmosphere of fear was such that people rose in the morning checking the tree line for mercenaries. Jones said there were sophisticated bugging devices on the trees. There weren’t enough children’s shoes because, as Jones explained, the customs department had broken into a shipment on the docks in Houston and taken them. The rains came early and Jones told the community that the CIA had seeded the clouds. He reminded them of the time he was driving in California and a driverless car tried to run him off the road. Who has a device that sophisticated? The answer was obvious. And now there were mercenaries in the trees.

Jones despaired of defending the town. Originally, during alerts, people were to ring the perimeter with guns, crossbows, pitchforks and hoes. But what could they do against trained mercenaries? Jones began to talk of revolutionary suicide as a final statement. The early suicide drills, most people felt, had been loyalty tests. But now he was talking about reincarnation, about how death was only a step to a higher plane. Suicide was tricky. If you did it selfishly, by yourself, you’d revert 5000 years to the Stone Age. But killing yourself for and with Father, that would be a glorious protest against repression.

Medically, paranoia refers to extreme cases of chronic and fixed delusions that develop slowly into complex, logical systems. A paranoid system may be both persecutory and grandiose. “I am great, therefore they persecute me; I am persecuted, therefore I am great.” True paranoids sometimes succeed in developing a following of people who believe them to be inspired. An essential element in the paranoid personality is the ability to discover “proof” of persecution in the overinterpretation of actual facts.

In the past, Jim Jones had real enemies. They were, for the most part, louts, bigots and segregationists: the kind of people who referred to him as a “nigger lover” and who spat on his wife when she appeared on the street with one of their adopted black children. Sickened by racist attacks, Jones moved his ministry from the Midwest to Brazil, then to northern California, where the hostilities began anew. Vandals shot out the windows of the Redwood Valley temple, and dead animals were tossed on the lawn. In August 1973, a mysterious blaze devastated the San Francisco temple.

Legitimately harassed, Jones began making connections between events, part real, part delusion. In 1976, Unita Blackwell Wright, the black woman mayor of Meyersville, Mississippi, spoke at the San Francisco temple. Two men were seen holding a satchel outside the temple. When approached, they got in a car and sped away. The license plate was traced to a Sacramento rental agency, and the names to a Mississippi air force base. Jones concluded that Mississippi Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was spying on him. The story was released to a newspaper. The fact that no one would print it seemed to confirm the awesome power of the senator.

“All our troubles,” one of Jones’ aides tried to convince me, “stemmed from taking on Stennis. After that, the attacks on us seemed more coordinated.” The temple was being bugged. A couple of reporters started nosing around for information for a smear campaign. One of the reporters was named George Klineman, and, according to Jones, he came from a big-time German “Nazi” family.

(George Klineman is a freelance reporter, a former student activist whose parents were born in America. He got wind of the story through the man who was to become his father-in-law, David Conn. Conn was an elder in the Disciples of Christ, a loose confederation of churches that included the Peoples Temple. In the early Seventies, Conn heard strange rumors about Jones: guns at the Redwood Valley temple, beatings, fear in those who left the Peoples Temple. Klineman interviewed temple defectors and took the information to one of his sources in the Treasury Department, which encompasses the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Klineman had simply asked his source if he knew anything about a northern California religious organization that was arming itself.)

The Nazis hated the temple. They sent notes, on their letterhead, with ugly messages, such as: “What we did to the Jews is nothing compared with what we’ll do to you niggers and nigger lovers.” Now, somehow, Stennis had turned the Nazis loose on the temple.

The connections were made: Stennis, Nazi reporters, the Treasury Department. Now, an even more sinister force was against Jones. A group of temple defectors were telling “lies,” speaking to the “Nazi” reporters, and for publication.

Klineman provided research material for another “Nazi” reporter, Marshall Kilduff, who, along with Phil Tracy, wrote a blistering exposeé of the temple in the August 1st, 1977, issue of New West magazine. Various defectors told stories of false healings, humiliations, beatings and financial improprieties. The article contained a sidebar arguing that the temple should be investigated. Jones used all the political clout at his disposal in a vain effort to kill the story. He fled to Guyana shortly before it was published.

FThe phenomenon of folie a deux was noted in medical literature as early as 1877. It is a “psychosis of association,” most often paranoid in nature, occurring frequently among people who live together intimately and in isolation. Folie imposée is a kind of folie à deux in which the delusions of a dominant individual infect one or more submissive and suggestible individuals who are dependent on and have a close emotional attachment to the infector.

In the isolation of the jungle, in the intimacy of the pavilion, Jim Jones raged against the defectors. They were organized now, and the traitors called themselves the Concerned Relatives. They were plotting against him, smearing him in the media, and in league with the shadow forces arrayed against him.

One of the defectors, Grace Stoen, had a six-year-old son, John Victor, living in Jonestown. Jones claimed he had sired the boy and that he would never give him up. Stoen hired a lawyer to start custody proceedings. For Jones, it was just another measure of how far they would go. Traitors were playing with children’s lives, using a six-year-old as a pawn in their plan to bring down the temple. They would take a boy away from his Father.

He was Father to all of them. He had taken the junkies and prostitutes off the street. He took in lonely old folks and fed the hungry. The young idealists had been floundering, unsure of how to make a better world. And he showed them. Without him there was nothing. Without him they would be back on the streets or lying on a slab in the morgue. The community was totally dependent on him. Without him they were nothing and he told them so. It frightened them to realize he was ill.

Jones told the community he had cancer, a kidney disorder, diabetes, hypertension and hypoglycemia. He was God, “God manifested a hundredfold,” the only God they’d ever known. The God of the Bible had been used to oppress people for centuries. He was building a socialist utopia, providing economic and social equality to the oppressed and scorned. And now traitors were killing him with their plots. One top aide saw him “crying hysterically, as if his whole life was a failure.”

His hate and fear were contagious. Elderly women united to kill the defectors. He held his hands up for the people to see, and they were running with blood. “I’m bleeding for the people,” he said. (“Ground glass,” a surviving Jonestown nurse told me later.)

Sometime during Peoples Forum, when members spoke of being homesick or wanting to leave, Jones would have a “heart attack.” The community could see what it was doing to Father, and they’d turn on the speaker in a fury. It wasn’t just people leaving. That might be acceptable. But no one ever left and remained neutral. They sold out. They told lies. They joined the traitors. Perhaps those who spoke of leaving were infiltrators. Everyone could see what their words did to Father. He had to protect himself. “No one leaves Jonestown unless they’re dead,” Jones said.

In May, Deborah Blakey, one of Jones’ top aides, left the Georgetown temple headquarters, obtained a temporary passport from the American embassy and fled to the United States. The date was May 13th, Jones’ birthday. When Father heard of the betrayal, he called a “white night,” a crisis alert, and the community sat stunned in the pavilion as he raged. They were betrayed. Wasn’t it better to die? He challenged anyone in the community to speak for life. When they did, he battered them with arguments. He said he was “the alpha and the omega,” the beginning and the end. He said it over and over again. The white night lasted twenty-eight hours. No one was allowed to go to the bathroom without an armed guard. Anyone who tried to run, he said, would be shot. Meals were brought into the pavilion. Finally, everyone in Jonestown voted to die.

Harold Cordell told me most of the details of this meeting. I asked him if he too had voted to die. He nodded glumly and said, “I figured if we just quit arguing with him, we could get some sleep.”

The temple hired Mark Lane, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist, in the hope that he could help unravel the mystifying web of harassment. But by early November, it seemed as if it was already too late. The shadow forces were squeezing the lifeblood out of Jonestown.

The National Enquirer was preparing an article. It would be another smear, like the one in New West, full of lies. Jones became more isolated and his dependence on drugs increased.

On November 1st, Leo Ryan wired Jones and informed him he would be visiting Jonestown on a fact-finding mission. Ryan had been talking to traitors all summer.

Shortly after the wire arrived, Terri Buford, Jones’ most trusted aide, left the temple. She had been working in San Francisco and told Jones, by shortwave radio, that she “had some conflicts.” Jones had often said that Terri was “the smartest person in the organization, besides me.” It was three days before he could bring himself to talk about it and then all he said was, “Someone left.” All the survivors I talked to, from those in leadership positions to the dissenters, agreed that Buford’s defection had a devastating effect on Jim Jones.

The conspiracy came to a head on Saturday, November 18th, during Ryan’s visit. Some temple members had deserted in the morning, when security was concentrating on the Ryan party. Now others were saying they wanted to leave with Ryan. Whole families – the Parkses, the Bogues – had turned traitor. They had lied on the floor, lied in front of the entire community when they confronted a father or mother or child. They were more concerned with blood relations than with the cause and Father. Jones looked beaten, defeated. A man named Don Sly flew into a rage and menaced Ryan with a knife, but he was subdued. Newsmen were present. There’d be more smears. Ryan would report to Congress, and the full weight of the United States government would fall on Jonestown.

When Ryan and his collection of traitors left for Port Kaituma, gunmen followed. The shadow forces had won.

An alert was called and the community rushed to the pavilion. Jones told them the congressman’s plane would “fall from the sky.” He could do things like that. Hadn’t he killed the man who put a curse on him simply by burning a passport? At Port Kaituma, a Jones loyalist named Larry Layton, who left with Ryan, pulled a gun. Although Layton later denied it – saying it was his idea to go after the congressman’s plane – Jones may have instructed him to shoot the pilot when the plane was airborne. But the party was too large and they were going to take two planes. Layton wounded two, leveled the gun at Dale Parks’ chest and fired. Dale fell back, thinking he had been shot, but the gun had jammed. He jumped Layton, and, with the help of another man, wrestled the gun away.

Meanwhile, gunmen arrived from Jonestown and began firing at the other plane. Ryan, Patty Parks and newsmen Bob Brown, Don Harris and Greg Robinson were killed. Others were wounded. The gunmen retreated to Jonestown.

“Those people won’t reach the States,” Jones told the community. Then he said it was time for all of them to die. He asked if there was any dissent. An older woman rose and said she didn think it was the only alternative. Couldn’t the temple members escape to Russia or Cuba? The old woman continued to plead with Jones. She had the right to choose how are wanted to live, she said, and how she wanted to die. The community shouted her down. She had no such right. She was a traitor. But she held her ground, an elderly woman, all alone.

“Too late,” Jones said. He instructed Larry Schact, the town doctor, to prepare the poison. Medical personnel brought the equipment into a tent that been used as a school and library. There were large syringes, without the needles, and small plastic containers full of a milky white liquid.

Jones told the community that the Guyanese Defense Force would be there in forty-five minutes. They’d shoot first and ask questions later. Those captured alive, he said, would be castrated. It was time to die with dignity. The children would be first.

A woman in her late twenties stepped out of the crowd. She was carrying her baby. The doctor estimated the child’s weight and measured an amount of the milky liquid into a syringe. A nurse pumped the solution into the baby’s mouth. The potassium cyanide was bitter to the tongue, and so the nurse gave the baby a sip of punch to wash it down. Then the mother drank her potion.

Death came in less than five minutes. The baby weat into convulsions, and Jones – very calm, very deliberate – kept repeating, “We must take care of the babies first.” Some mothers brought their own children up to the killing trough. Others took children from reluctant mothers. Some of the parents and grandparents became hysterical, and they screamed and sobbed as their children died.

“We must die with dignity,” Jones said. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.” One thirteen-year-old girl refused her poison. She spit it out time after time and they finally held her and forced her to take it. Many people in the pavilion, especially the older ones, just watched, waiting. Others walked around, hugging old friends. Others screamed and sobbed.

Jones stepped off his throne and walked into the audience. “We must hurry,” he said. He grabbed people by the arm and pulled them to the poison. Some struggled, weakly. One girl put up a fight and she had to be injected.

After an individual took the poison, two others would escort him, one on each arm, to a clearing and lay him on the ground, face down. It wouldn’t do to have bodies piled up around the poison, slowing things down.

Stanley Clayton watched as “one of the brothers came into the pavilion. He was running. When he came in, he started stumbling. He turned and he flipped over and was just lying there. He was suffering. He was shaking and carrying on, spitting up his last spit, eyes turning up in his head. All of them were suffering. I was terrified and looked for a way to get out.” Security men with crossbows circled the pavilion. Men with guns guarded the periphery.

Odell Rhodes made himself inconspicuous. He even held his students, the ones who called him Daddy, as they died. And he saw that the only people who were allowed through the circle of crossbows were medical personnel. He heard the doctor ask a nurse to get his stethoscope. Odell fell into step beside her. The guards stopped them, but the nurse said, “We’re going to the medical office.” As they stepped beyond the crossbows, Odell realized that he would have to kill the nurse. Fortunately, she instructed him to look in one building while she searched the other. Odell entered the nursing office and made his way to the back of the building, where there was a senior center; most of the people there were bedridden.

“Are you the man who is going to take us up there?” an old woman asked.

“You know what they’re doing up there?” Odell said.

“We know.”

“I’m not the man to take you.”

Stanley too decided to risk arrows or bullets rather than take poison. He sorted through the bodies, pretending to look for people who might still be alive. There were only about 100 people left alive when he saw his chance and took it. He was lucky. It will never be known how many people were murdered, how many saw there was no escape and chose poison to arrows or bullets.

The security men were found with the rest. They, certainly, must have died voluntarily. In the end, it appears as if Jim Jones put a pistol under his right ear and ended his own life.

I missed the flight back to Miami and ended up spending a night in Curacao. There was a television in the hotel room and I found that, after staring into the face of horror for two weeks, all I could do was sit there and watch Popeye cartoons in Spanish while my mind spun and slipped gears.

Jones was a contradiction of everything he stood for.

He denigrated sex, but he slept with any woman who pleased him.

He brought homosexuals to the floor for beatings, but had sex with men.

He stood for social equality, and ate platters full of meat while others ate rice.

He preached racial equality, and yet the leadership of his primarily black organization was mostly white.

He railed against slavery, but he forced his followers to work twelve hours a day in the fields. He fed them maggoty rice and they called him Father instead of Massa.

He feared oppression but became an oppressor.

In the end, he put a bullet through his brain, killing all those things he hated with such vehemence.

There was nothing to feel for Jim Jones but a sure, steady loathing. It was harder to think about the people of Jonestown. Many of them had suffered in America, and they had turned to Jim Jones for help.

I remembered sitting with Odell Rhodes just after he had come back from identifying bodies. Another survivor asked him if he had seen a certain woman who had been very special and very dear. Odell said he hadn’t seen her. The lie was transparent.

Later, Odell told me about it. She had written on her arm in ball point pen, “Jim Jones is the only one.” It was better to think she had been murdered.

Having a theory about it helped some. Mine was that Jones was paranoid, in the clinical sense, and that he infected others. The mechanism of folie imposee was magnified by the classic techniques of brainwashing. The mass suicides of history – Masada (the hilltop fortress where, in 73 A.D., nearly 1000 Jews killed themselves rather than surrender to the Romans) and Saipan (under invasion from American forces, 1000 Japanese took their lives in 1944) – had occurred when a people were under siege and surrounded by enemies. Jones and the people of Jonestown were no exception: for months they had been harassed, persecuted, surrounded and besieged by shadow forces. When the final attack was imminent and undeniable, they chose to die.

I assumed in Curacao I might finally get more than two hours of sleep. Since Tuesday, November 28th, the day after the planeload of newsmen visited Jonestown, there hadn’t been much to do except sit around the Graham Greene room and touch bases for the third or fourth time with the survivors. The problem was that we had been pushing so hard, we’d been so charged with adrenalin that it was hard to break the inertia. One network TV crew was filming a cockroach crawling across the floor. They had the lights on it and the camera going, and the soundman was crawling along next to it with a microphone.

A few of the survivors were charging for interviews, and it seemed to me that some of them sold their exclusive story several times. (When one reporter phoned his editor in New York and asked, “What am I authorized to offer?” the editor replied, “Offer him a glass of Kool-Aid.”) I didn’t pay anyone, but I didn’t begrudge them the money. It was the first time many of them had had cash in their pockets in years, and some hired prostitutes from a nearby brothel to stay with them, there at the Park Hotel.

Some people – other survivors and newsmen – were outraged by the situation. It struck me differently. I remembered the attitude toward sex at Jonestown, and I saw that these men and women treated each other with affection. In some way it seemed to me a bittersweet affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit.

This story is from the January 25, 1979 issue of Rolling Stone.

The Millions – Fifty Years On: Jane Jacobs and the Rebirth of New York

Why did a city like New York recover when a city like Detroit, which had a more durable industrial base, fell into blight and decay? The answer, Jacobs argues in The Economy of Cities, turns on the ability of a city’s inhabitants to innovate. Cities grow, she says, through a process she calls “import replacement.” This occurs when local tradesmen produce for themselves the goods and services they had previously been importing and then use the skills learned from this local production to create new products, which they can then export in great bulk.

Detroit, she notes, began as a port for shipping flour across the Great Lakes. Soon, local manufacturers were building their own steamships to make the lake crossings and got so good at it they began making ocean-going ships for use in other cities. This not only put money into local coffers, but supported the dozens of local engine-parts makers Henry Ford drew upon when he founded the Ford Motor Company.

But here’s the rub: the auto industry was so successful that once Ford arrived at his greatest innovation, the assembly line, the industry so dominated Detroit’s economy that there was no local market for further innovation, and, as Jacobs points out, it was only a matter of time before another city – in this case, cities in Japan – improved upon Ford’s ideas and made better, cheaper cars.

The Economy of Cities came out four years before the gas crisis that set Detroit’s long tailspin in motion, but it eerily predicts the dilemma the city faces today, in which a moribund auto industry, out-innovated by foreign competitors, had to be bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer to avoid collapse.

Like Detroit, New York began as a port city, but in New York’s case a principal byproduct of its shipping trade was a robust banking industry, which survived the city’s manufacturing collapse. Even as New York was begging for a bailout from the federal government in the mid-1970s, young hotshots like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, many of them children and grandchildren of immigrants who had filled the ghettos earlier in the century, were inventing new ways to own and finance large companies. Think of all the financial innovations of the last thirty years: junk bonds, hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, asset-backed securities, credit derivatives, subprime mortgage markets, and on and on.

Yes, bankers are evil, and, yes, the banking industry required a federal bailout even larger than that of the auto industry’s, but like it or not, New York is the safest large city in America, with a vital private sector and a buoyant real estate market, largely because the living, breathing organism we call Wall Street has spent the last thirty years innovating its way out of obsolescence.

Forbes – Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA

How whole industries disappear

Take the story of Dell Computer and its Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The story is told in the brilliant book by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription:

Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. On successive occasions, ASUSTeK came back and took over the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and the design of the computer.

In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However the next time, ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost. As The Innovator’s Prescription concludes:

Decades of outsourcing manufacturing have left US industry without the means to invent the next generation of high-tech products that are key to rebuilding its economy, as noted by Garry Pisano and Willy Shih in a classic article Thus in “Restoring American Competitiveness” (Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009).

The US has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the US, even if Amazon wanted to:

• The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
• The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producting flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
• The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the US supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
• The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
• The controller board is made in China because US companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
• The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

An exception is Apple [AAPL], which “has been able to preserve a first-rate design capability in the States so far by remaining deeply involved in the selection of components, in industrial design, in software development, and in the articulation of the concept of its products and how they address users’ needs.”

…

Pisano and Shih have a frighteningly long list of industries of industries that are “already lost” to the USA:

Their list of industries “at risk” is even longer and more worrisome.

What’s to be done?

With such a complex societal problem, it’s hard not to start from Albert Einstein’s insight: “The significant problems that we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” Many actors will have to play a role.

• Company leaders: Business leaders need to recommit themselves to continuous innovation and the values and practices that are necessary to accomplish that. i.e radical management. As Pisano and Shih write: “Whether you’re the US firm IBM with a major research laboratory in Switzerland or the Swiss company Novartis operating in the biotech commons in the Boston area, sacrificing such a commons for short-term cost benefits is a risky proposition.”
• Accountants: Accountants need to get beyond the mental prison of cost accounting and embrace the thinking in throughput accounting that puts the emphasis on how companies can add new value, rather than just cutting costs.
• Management theorists and consultants: stop rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic of traditional management (e.g. by finding new and ingenious ways to cut costs) and start understanding and disseminating management theory that is fit for the 21st Century.
• Investors: Investors need to realize that the companies of the future are those that practice continuous innovation as Apple, Amazon and Salesforce, as compared to companies practicing traditional management, such Wal-Mart, Cisco or GE. Investors need to realize that short-term financial gains are ephemeral: the companies that will generate real value are those that do what is necessary to continuously innovate.
• Government: Government has a role to play in protecting and promoting fields of expertise or what Pisano and Shih call “the industrial commons”. Thus: “Government-sponsored endeavors that have made a huge difference in the past three decades include DARPA’s VLSI chip development program and Strategic Computing Initiative; the DOD’s and NASA’s support of supercomputers and of NSFNET (an important contributor to the Internet); and the DOD’s support of the Global Positioning System, to mention a handful.”
• Politicians: At a time of poisonously divisive political debate, in which candidates recite anti-government mantras and call for “getting government out of the way of the private sector”, it is time for serious politicians to step up and examine which parts of the private sector are fostering, and which parts are destroying, the economy of the country. They must stop embodying e.e. cummings definition of a politician as “an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.”
• Economists: Economists need to realize that merely adding up the numbers is not enough. They have to look at the meaning behind the numbers. When they trumpet their finding that “Chinese goods are only 1% of the U.S. economy”, it’s akin to saying “we kept the house but gave away the keys.”

Is cost accounting the problem?

One reader (“justin431”) wrote:

This comment is in fact an illustration of the mental guide-rails generated by cost accounting. There is an automatic assumption that when faced with a market challenge the way to be more competitive is to cut costs. The possibility of adding more value is unconsciously eliminated.

It would be wrong though to say that cost accounting is the main cause of these problems. But it is a contributing factor. With decisions and thinking and values based on cost-accounting and short-term profits, Dell’s fate was sealed. If decisions and thinking and values had been based on how could Dell deliver more value to customers sooner, the outcome would not have been predetermined, as Apple has shown.

Megan McArdle: Create a Special Job Credit for the Long-Term Unemployed

How to get employers to hire people who have already been out of work for too long? Traditional government solutions like job training have an absolutely dismal record. The only government solution to long-term unemployment we’ve ever found was to have World War II, and for various reasons, we’re probably not going to reauthorize that particular program.

One suggestion is to give them direct incentives to choose the long-term unemployed over those who are already in work, or out of work for only a short time. How? We could exempt new hires from both the employee and the employer sides of the payroll tax, one month for every month that they were unemployed.

The result is a direct wage subsidy of more than 10%. But it is a time-limited subsidy, and one carefully targeted to those who need it the most. By the time the tax relief expires, these workers will have been reintegrated into the labor force. This will cost the government something of course–but not nearly as much as supporting them on welfare, disability, or early retirement–or the prison system.

Mike Haynie: Unlock Capital for Small Business

The United States should create a national microlending program positioned to provide ready access to capital to small business. It is widely acknowledged that small business represents the engine of job creation in this country. Small business accounts for approximately 50 percent of all private-sector jobs, and roughly 70 percent of all new jobs created in the past decade.

In today’s environment, banks have much less incentive to extend a traditional small-business loan ($5,000 to $25,000), because the relationship between the transaction costs associated with processing that loan and the return on that investment to the bank often doesn’t make economic sense. It’s all about opportunity cost.

For example, consider that the transaction costs associated with processing a $10,000 loan to a small business and a $5 million loan to a large business are roughly the same. Also recognize that the return on investment to the bank (that is, the interest paid on the loan) increases proportionally with the size of the loan–the larger the loan, the more interest income generated relative to the “cost” of issuing and servicing the loan. Therefore, whether you are a large public bank with a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders or a small credit union responsible to its membership, there is an incentive to focus on larger and thus more profitable loans. Banks are in business to make a profit.

Research highlights that most small businesses, especially over the first five years of operation, require only small and incremental infusions of capital to sustain positive growth. A national microlending program positioned to provide capital infusions of $1,000-$20,000 to small business–created as a partnership between government and community-based lenders–would represent an compelling channel for small businesses to access start-up and growth capital.

Boston.com – The downside of diversity

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.

“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”

The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable — but discomfort, it turns out, isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.