Notes on Chapter 12

As a voter, as a consumer, and previously as a campus administrator I have/had an intense dislike for unsolicited contact, invariably with the intent of a hard sell.  Robocalls are the absolute worst of these.  If you want an example where technology has made things worse, that is it.  Emails are a close second.  I still get many of these as if I am still an administrator, even though I retired a dozen years ago. Then there are those who come door to door.

There seems to be a romanticized notion of making this type of contact.   When it is a kid selling something, then okay, especially if the kid is from the neighborhood.  The political solicitations and the offering of home services/products this way, I don't like.  I'm uncomfortable with strangers in this circumstance and can't have conversations easily on these topics with somebody I don't know. Much of what I wrote about regarding the relationship between Liaisons and Affiliate candidates reflects my own discomfort with how things are currently done.

This educational effort as conceived in the story is highly labor intensive. Earlier in the book I took pains to consider the compensation of members of the Writing Group and the CEO of The Minute Women.  But in this chapter and the previous one I ignored the issue of paying the Liaisons and didn't discuss whether that work would be paid or volunteer.  I'd like to discuss those issues here.

When the work was to produce white papers and videos, both of which would be seen online, this is what economists call public goods.  The cost in production is largely independent of the volume of use.  (The quality of what is produced impacts cost, but the volume of use does not.)  In contrast, the training/educational activities that the Liaisons provide are private goods.  The amount of labor required is roughly proportional to the volume of use.  

In the case where it is paid work, there is then the question whether donations come in large enough and fast enough to cover this labor cost.  Alternatively, there is the question whether the high rollers on the Board of Directors (or elsewhere) are willing to cover this labor cost without extracting their pound of flesh in a way that fundamentally distorts the mission. 

It may be that some combination of volunteer work and paid work makes sense. Consider it a sprint till the 2024 election and imagine the Liaison work is volunteer until then.  If that election produces the desired result, then that's it.  If that election only gets to an outcome part way there, and if The Minute Women want to sustain beyond that to get to the finish line, then the Liaison works become paid.  

In other words, until now we really haven't considered how long this effort will take to get to the goal, and maybe it never will.  Without knowing this, it probably makes sense for The Minute Women to have an open ended time commitment, to keep going as long as it seems real progress is being made, but then to cease operation if it is felt a dead end has been reached before the goal has been achieved.  In the last subsection of this chapter, I tried to communicate these ideas a bit without getting into detail.  I thought that the detail would detract from the story rather than aid it.