Ducky Defectiveness

Are we simply a defective culture?

by Doug Collins

About two years ago, this newspaper initiated an contest that invited readers to send short essays about why most rubber duckies--the yellow floating toys--don't float right, why most of them topple over disgracefully, like dead ducks in your bubblebath. I'll remind you that four out of five rubber ducks I acquired didn't float upright well, the way a rubber ducky should. The only one I found that really worked well was an old one I bought at a yard sale.

Some readers took on the rubber ducky question, sending essays--some flippant and some serious--and winning free subscriptions. That was all fun, but the deeper question of ducky defectiveness has still haunted me, long after the essay contest was over. Isn't the question of why rubber duckies don't work right the same as the question of why generally many things don't work right? For example, other products that you buy in the store that don't do what they promise. People that don't do what they promise. Schools that don't educate well. Corporations that pillage rather than produce. Unions that don't represent workers well. News that doesn't inform people about what's important. Insurance with all kinds of loopholes. Food that makes people unhealthy. Wars that are ill-conceived and horribly botched. Societies that are self-destructive.

Not convinced of the connection? Then consider alone the life of a rubber duck in detail. No longer is it made domestically for the use of the children of the toy-factory worker. It is now fabricated in far-off locations, most likely China, by people who probably will never see it in a local store at an affordable price, and who probably don't have any intention of using it anyway. It is designed by well-paid commercial artists and plastics engineers who work ten hour days and have little time for kids. It is marketed by people who never even take the time to put it in a tub of water and see if it floats right. It is bought by people who are attracted by its cuteness, disappointed by its performance, and too busy to return it or complain about it. The result? The duckies don't float right, and factories keep churning them out.

The striking characteristic of modern goods production is the distance between the user and the producer. The foreign factory worker is distant in a physical and cultural sense. The designer and marketer, though they are likely Americans, are distant in a psychological sense: they deal in a myriad of products which they never use themselves in everyday life, and for which they have little personal regard or care. Like other average Americans, they are working the longest job hours in the world. Sure they can afford to buy all sorts of products, but they have less and less time to even use them or know much about them.

Both the Chinese factory worker and the American designer suffer from similar dilemmas: not enough money and/or not enough time. A good labor movement should help, but--alas--we have a largely defective labor movement, whose general movement has been downward in terms of numbers of workers represented.

The short-term sale-ability of a product becomes the important thing for marketers, designers, and factory laborers alike--all of whom probably have little or no job security. Sales can be measured quickly and easily, and one's job depends on them. But long-term concerns like functionality and durability are both much harder to measure. Surface attributes, such as cuteness, become paramount, so that people will pull out their pocketbooks on a whim, for whatever new garbage is displayed or advertised. Functional essence is a secondary concern. There are so many items to buy, and there is so little time to return defective ones, that defects are just an accepted part of doing business. Consumer junk crams the garbage landfills, and the chemical contents leach into our soil and groundwater. Our environment becomes defective as well.

Like the defective duckies--which must be propped upright in the water in order to have the appearance of working correctly--our whole US economy has for the past few decades become increasingly propped up by the Asian economies, which invest heavily in greenbacks in order to keep the US dollar high and their biggest export market--namely us--ready to buy their stuff. Few international economists would disagree with this, but few Americans know or think about it, because they are generally not informed by our defective news services, which don't tell Americans about the most basic matters that affect their future. Analysis doesn't sell toothpaste ads as well as sports, tomorrow's weather, and the latest murder or child molestation spectacle.

When the bubble-of-cheap-imports bursts, when sales slump in the US, when the Asian economies have found other good markets and have no more need to prop up the dollar, when the residual wealth of the US has been sucked mostly dry by our import/export imbalance, at that point the Asian economies will sell their US dollars, resulting in what will likely be a drastic international devaluation of our currency. We are poised to flop when this occurs, just like a top-heavy rubber ducky let loose in the water. Having little current productive capacity--because our factories have all moved to other countries--we'll have to learn again to make things, but who will show us how? There'll be a brain-drain to other, better economies. The edge in technical expertise that the US has had for the last 50 years rests largely on the strength of the propped-up US dollar. Go to any university engineering department, and tell me how many of the students in its graduate program were born in the US. Many of them, probably most of them, come from other countries because they can currently get higher-paying jobs here, paid in US dollars. When US currency falls in value, working here will not be the international aspiration that it has been in the past decades. And our defective K-12 educational system--behind international standards--will not be able to save us.

Defective rubber duckies, my friends, are simply a tiny metaphor not only for our country, but also for ourselves. After all, what do most Americans do when we they see that things don't work as they should? In the home, we have another soda or switch the channel on the big-screen remote. In government, we assign a do-nothing "task force" to look into it and file a report that no one reads. In the workplace, we have meetings about how to have meetings, engage in "teamwork building" and then fire anyone who brings up substantive issues. We show just as little care for our own long-term future as we do for the future of others. Our own avoidance and lack of care are the most basic defects of all. To care about yourself and others means to care about why things don't work right, and to do something about it.