Tag Archives: New York Times

The death of literature part 11,274, from Saul Bellow

October 19, 2009 By in Culture, Life, Reading Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early ’30s, taught that our old tired civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.”

That’s from Saul Bellow’s “Hidden Within Technology’s Empire, a Republic of Letters” for the New York Times’ Writers on Writing collection. Fortunately he didn’t listen to the various Spenglers of his day. I often find it amusing to read the various predictions of literature’s demise, which have so frequently been trumpeted in the 20th Century and now the 21st; Orwell does a good job with the same theme in his collected essays.

Although being wrong in the past doesn’t necessarily equate to being wrong in the present, the poor track records of both religious apocalypse and the demise of reading tend to make me skeptical of new claims about either.

Road Dogs — Elmore Leonard

July 7, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I’m very much on the record as an Elmore Leonard fan, but his newest novel, Road Dogs, reminds of me of Mr. Paradise, and not in a flattering way: they both strain a bit too hard and don’t come together as well as they should.

That’s an unfairly vague statement. But I can’t easily find a place to situate it in the text of Road Dogs. Plot points might provide assistance: bank robber Jack Foley of Out of Sight fame gets off thanks to his cellmate Cundo Rey, meets the beautiful Dawn Navarro, and implicitly agrees to participation in whatever scheme Cundo has, presumably involving A Simple Plan-levels of money.

The convoluted plot explanation in this New York Times review by Janet Maslin shows the futility of trying to write succinctly about an Elmore Leonard novel, as tracking the array of motives and ideals behind each character is one of the many pleasures his novels give; they are practically a master class in plot, which might be in part what makes them so real. Each character is (mostly) rational in a different way; the characters don’t make wildly implausible leaps and evolve in a way that’s realistic and yet surprising.

Most of the time, anyway. The setup for Road Dogs sounds good, but I kept thinking: would Foley really go along with the game, knowing that he’s likely to be played? When he sleeps with Dawn—too early in the plot—does the premonition of ill consequences with Cundo reverberate. Would Foley let Dawn’s hustle—pretending to be a mystic or medium—go on, knowing it was silly? Maybe all three are unfair, or silly, but they seem character violations, which are especially surprising in a writer who so seldom commits them, whose characters breathe like your roommate, or the guy you knew from high school who got sent up for weed, or whatever. Jack Foley did in Out of Sight. In this novel, Cundo sees him as I did in Out of Sight while they pass time in prison:

The way I see you, Jack, you smart, you can be a serious guy, but you don’t like to show anything is important to you. You here, you don’t complain—not anymore—you could be an old hippie living here. You get your release . . . Ah, now you get to think what you going to do.

If that’s what it takes to get Jack into whatever Cundo plans, he’s not so smart a guy. The real question becomes, why do bright guys like Foley bother dealing with so many idiots? It’s a paradoxical issue present in many Leonard books, and one that can be explained away through circumstances, upbringing, temperament, and more, and yet it still sticks out when I consider many of his works as a whole, like a bit of sand in an otherwise greased machine.

And the grease is still present. Leonard gives a fabulous description of an empty cop who “didn’t seem to know where he wanted to go, got to the end of his marble-slab desk, nothing on it, and stopped.” I like that—”nothing on it,” much as there’s nothing in the guy’s mind. But Leonard can also over do it, as when he makes fun of the Alan Moore-types through the mumbo jumbo a woman named Danialle spouts:

[It’s] sort of spooky… talking about the reality of the unseen world. It exists on a higher vibrational frequency than ours. The temperature’s a constant seventy-eight degrees, and there aren’t any insects, but there are animals, pets.

In the context it’s funny enough but never goes past that; this isn’t a study in the psychological, as The Turn of the Screw is.

Despite these problems, one can count on Leonard for consistency: since switching from Westerns to a genre that’s a kissing cousin to mystery, which I call “caper novels,” he’s written 80,000-word novels featuring protagonists who are streetwise but not over educated, clever without being brilliant, and cool until they’re pushed too far. Crime hovers around each novel; a few have it at their center, as in one of his two best novels, Out of Sight and Get Shorty.

Leonard’s much praised dialog still often kills. Here’s Jack Foley, reformed bank robber dealing with a man who needs no further description:

Where you been… you get stuck with the white-power ding-dongs, the best thing is to sound as dumb as they are and they’ll think you’re funny. You heard them laugh, didn’t you? And they don’t laugh much. It’s against their code of behavior.

Leonard’s style remains, but Road Dogs feels like he’s coasting, and the latest variation of coat and pants are not quite tailored as they should be; stitches show, and we get the impression a better job might have been done. Maybe Leonard shows his hand too early, as Cundo Rey and Dawn Navarro don’t get more attractive as the narrative progresses, and they don’t throw much in the way of surprises. They rub off, unfortunately, on Foley, who suffers by the company he keeps, as we all do. But he doesn’t find new company, as he did in Out of Sight, who will show him in the style he deserves.

(See Robert Pinsky’s review in the New York Times, which apparently loves Leonard so much that they’ll look at Road Dogs twice. He says:

But a good book should also be about something. Although it isn’t always mentioned, Leonard’s books have subjects. “Road Dogs” is about the varying degrees of truth and baloney in human relationships. Sometimes the truth or the baloney is lethal.

I’m not sure this is true—not for this one of Leonard’s books. That might be part of its problem—that, or all of his books are about truth and baloney to a large degree, especially given the milieu Leonard writes about. Maybe this thought will be the subject of an eventual academic article.)

Links: Freedom, humanity, universal empathy, and other such small topics

December 6, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* MercatorNet’s John Armstrong argues that “Economic freedom has turned toxic because we lack the cultural maturity that the humanities used to provide” (hat tip NYT Ideas Blog). Although I’m naturally susceptible to arguments like this:

The long-term health of the economy depends on the flourishing of the humanities: an important factor in our present troubles is their self-imposed weakness.

The dependency is hard to see because the standard ways in which we think about capitalism and the humanities are misleading.

I also find them difficult to believe. Armstrong’s historical view implies that the humanities once had a much stronger influence on public life, which is possible, but even if they did, boom/bust cycles far worse than this one were common in the 19th Century, as this list indicates (the panic of 1893 was particularly grim). Humanities or no, panics and boom/bust cycles might be part of human psychology and behavior, as Henry Blodget argues in “Why Wall Street Always Blows It:”

But most bubbles are the product of more than just bad faith, or incompetence, or rank stupidity; the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that they will form. In this sense, bubbles are perfectly rational—or at least they’re a rational and unavoidable by-product of capitalism (which, as Winston Churchill might have said, is the worst economic system on the planet except for all the others). Technology and circumstances change, but the human animal doesn’t. And markets are ultimately about people.

He gives numerous examples of bubble behavior in action, along with small-scale studies that seem to demonstrate bubble behavior even in controlled environments. The humanities might offer many benefits, pleasure chief among them, even if doing so is unlikely to prevent bubbles or take the rough edges off capitalism. Or maybe not: Paul Graham asks “Is It Worth Being Wise?” and basically answers “yes, but not as important as intelligence.” He defines “wise” and “intelligent” throughout the essay, for those of you wondering why he’d set near synonyms as opposites. Graham, however, probably has the culture maturity Armstrong writes about and thus probably takes it for granted in a way that allows him to disparage the humanities more than he probably should. That disparagement occurs throughout his essay, and although many of his criticisms are valid, he overstretches them, much as Armstrong probably overstretches the virtues of the humanities.

Maybe Armstrong is suggesting the second great purpose of art, as described by D.H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature:

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us…

I’m not sure art has any practical truths to offer: like Nabokov, I suspect art’s chief purpose is itself and aesthetic bliss, and as such, any practical truths are at best secondary. Or maybe art is whatever we make it to be, and Armstrong’s effort to make the humanities—of which art is a large part—into a helper of the SEC is as valid as Nabokov’s belief in art as itself. The challenge in implementing Armstrong’s view is that convincing banking executives to start reading, say, Dr. Faustus and The Lord of the Rings, seems rather improbable. And even if they did, it’s still an overly large leap to imagine that doing so will tangibly improve the economic situation.

Alas, I’m using what humanities knowledge I have to argue against the importance of the humanities, at least for the reasons stated in the article. Perhaps that’s one of the humanities’ major problems: its own practitioners doubt its utility and have the skills to point out why.

* Mark Sarvas recommends The Gift, a book he praises in unusual terms: “I’m often asked why I persist here at TEV for no financial rewards. The best answer I can offer is to stick a copy of The Gift into your hands, albeit virtually.”

With an endorsement like that, expect a post on The Gift sometime in the not-too-distant future.

* By way of The Elegant Variation once again, read about the power of fiction to portray other worlds in our own world. To use one example from the article:

Yet even if we understand things as narratives, most of us would rather read the traditional story presented by a novel than we would the rather dryer story of a policy report. Best-selling novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner thus reach a huge audience (especially when helped along by the other great narrative art and made into a blockbuster film) whilst academic research, no matter how insightful, will never be read by millions. Which is why the report’s authors venture that Hosseini’s novel has probably “done more to educate western readers about the realities of daily life in Afghanistan than any government media campaign, advocacy organisation report, or social science research.”

I’ve heard of—who hasn’t?—but never read The Kite Runner and so can’t comment on that in particular, but it’s hard to deny the power of narratives to fiction in general. I’ve begun reading a triple-pack of Henry Green’s novels, Loving; Living; Party Going, and they seem as close to working-class Britain circa World War II as I’m ever going to get. When this mimetic function fails, the novel often fails with it, and here I’m thinking of novels like Waverley and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Consider that article as reinforcement regarding the second of D.H. Lawrence’s propositions regarding art, as already stated above:

Art has two great functions. First, it provides an emotional experience. And then, if we have the courage of our own feelings, it becomes a mine of practical truth. We have had the feelings ad nauseam. But we’ve never dared dig the actual truth out of them, the truth that concerns us…

* More on the maybe-changes in culture being driven by video:

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

The passage indicates the questionable grandiosity in tone, but the thinking about what the pervasiveness of video says regarding society is still worthwhile.

* If you’ve read that, you much deserve a break, and Quid plura? offers one:

…and then, once in a while, you’re invited to yak it up at a writers’ event, and you retire to a pizza joint for a late night of unrepeatable stories with smart, funny people, and you begin to understand the value of your 300-page calling card beyond the reviews and royalty statements. Writers like to gripe and whine, but when it comes to this one benefit, don’t let authors tell you otherwise, not even my fellow recluses. The social aspect, unlike the process of writing itself, is even more fun than you think it will be.

* The publishing industry is of less interest to me than actual reading, but nonetheless this insightful bit from the New Yorker’s book blog is fascinating.

The mandatory end-of-year post

December 5, 2008 By in Books, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In case you’re interested in pointless listmaking, the New York Times offers its 10 best books of 2008. Of them, I’ve read only Netherland, a novel I felt ambiguous about and still haven’t reread. Roberto Bolaño is on the list for 2666 and is highly praised by many good critics, but I didn’t like The Savage Detectives. The nonfiction side looks more worthwhile, especially given the books that delve into the unconstitutional, anti-democratic, and cruel things the United States is doing to people, but those things are already fairly well-known and the books seem more destined to be cited than read.

Last year, I expressed skepticism at the top 10 and 100 lists at the New York Times, and this year I’ll reiterate that (although I’ve read fewer books on the list this time). This year, I’ll link to a post from January 2008 that in turn linked to a number of my favorite (and much recommended) books. To that list I’ll add The Name of the Rose and The Time Paradox.

No novels published this year enraptured me; if you think I missed one that should, send an e-mail. Finally, if you’re going to read novels based on lists, you might try Modern Library’s Top 100 instead, although it has some clunkers (Appointment in Samarra at 22? Someone(s) must be sentimental for his (their?) youth).

The Best Software Writing — Joel Spolsky

July 28, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Well-written, insightful books on subjects I know nothing about often impart some lasting and surprising ideas. The biggest problem is finding them, since you don’t know they’re well-written or insightful till it’s too late. Pleasant surprises have abounded recently, one being The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood. Another comes from Joel Spolsky, who writes a popular blog on software called Joel on Software and edited The Best Software Writing I. In an industry where books age date so fast as to be almost pointless, like the hardware that runs software, one astonishing aspect is how The Best Software Writing, published in 2005 and composed of many essays written earlier, is still relevant and fascinating—and will probably be so for a long time yet.

Take Danah Boyd’s “Autistic Social Software,” which, like most of The Best Software Writing, explains how computers and people interact. It was published around 2004, which represented a societal turning point not widely recognized at the time, as virtually everyone my age hopped on what we now call “social networking sites.”* She observes that those sites weren’t very good because they’re not focused on users, even drawing a not entirely apt analogy similar to the one I made Science Fiction, literature, and the haters:

While many science fiction writers try to convey the nuances of human behavior, their emphasis is on the storyline, and they often convey the social issues around a technology as it affects that story. Building universal assumptions based on the limited scenarios set forth by sci-fi is problematic; doing so fails to capture the rich diversity of human behavior.

Her comments about science fiction are accurate regarding much, but not all of it, just like her comments about the focus of programmers on computers and their limitations, forcing us to adapt to them rather than vice-versa. The market has a knack for giving people what they want, however, and that focus is changing over time as iterative generations of software improve and people move to sites that work better. Boyd says, “[…] there is a value in understanding social life and figuring out how to interact with people on shared terms.” Right: and those who figure out what that means will be rewarded. I’m reminded of a programmer friend whose e-mail signature says “Computers aren’t the future; people are,” and I suspect he would approve of the lessons in this essay and larger book.

That’s a single example of how you take offline phenomenon—how people congregate—and apply it to an online context. Other essays reverse that dynamic. Clay Shirky’s “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy” explains how online groups form and break apart in much the same fashion as offline groups. You could look at this in terms of clubs, families, countries or jobs, all of which have similar cohesive and destructive forces assailing them over different time periods. One thing the military has going for it is hundreds of years of experience in taking people and forcing them to work together toward a common goal. Many sports accomplish the same thing. But in both cases, the tasks—destroying things and killing people, moving a ball down a field—are narrow and well-defined compared to the wide-open field of artistic creation. Granted, both the military and sports have their wider, macro possibilities—what do we destroy and who do we kill and why? (this question is more often known as politics), or what rules should the game have and why?—but they’re not intrinsically undefined like software, or other forms of intellectual endeavor (Paul Graham wrote about this in Great Hackers.) The incentives are easier to get right. In software, like life, they’re not. Compensation becomes harder to get right when goals are less easily defined, which is a major subject in one essay and subsidiary in others. I wrote about it as applied to grant writing, using Spolsky as a launching pad, and if more people realized what he’s already discovered, we might not waste so much effort trying to reinvent the wheel or invent futile algorithms for what is inherently a tricky subject.

The Best Software Writing is, yes, about software, but it’s about more, including the future. Those interested in seeing it, and the inside of the most transformative industry of recent times, would do well to read it. It contains more thought than Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?, a New York Times article published yesterday (read it, or the rest of the paragraph won’t make much sense). Why hasn’t the reporter figured done enough background research? I wish I could say. It contrasts with Shirky’s other article, “User as Group,” which demonstrates much of what’s right about the new mediums without questioning the medium’s utility—something that the New York Times article utterly misses. Furthermore, on the individual level, the individual is going to suffer the pain of insufficient literacy or numeracy in the form of inferior jobs and a less intense life. Many seem happy to make such trade-offs, and we go on telling them to eat their Wheaties. If they don’t, they won’t be able to write at the level of skill and detail in The Best Software Writing, which would make the world a poorer place, but those involved don’t seem to care as a group. Oh well. What harm not reading Spolsky or Fred Brooks will harm the individual, but it will also cause splash damage to others who have to work with them. To the extent reading online ameliorates those problems, as Shirky implies, we’ve made improvements. He, Spolsky, and Brooks who write about programming only to the extent you’re unwilling to see programming as a metaphor.

The major fear articles like “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” express, I suspect, is that many people are getting along without books and stories. On a societal basis, this probably isn’t a good thing, since democracies depend on educated citizens with historical knowledge—but on a personal level, if you’re a mid-level account manager at some large company, how much does your familiarity with Tolstoy and Norman Rush really help or hurt you? On the other hand, if you want to be at the top of virtually any field, you need to read and understand the world. In software, that means books like The Best Software Writing, which, though it consists almost entirely of pieces that originally appeared online, is a physical, dead-tree book that I liked reading on paper far more than I would’ve on the screen, where I already spend entirely too much of my face time. I want what I find convenient, as do most people, and many of the essays point toward defining what that means. It’s got more about how fulfill human desires than most books, fiction or nonfiction. Volume II of The Best Software Writing might never appear. Given the strength of the first, I wish it would.

* I hope future readers find this strange phrase an anachronism showing how primitive we are, because it’s ugly and imprecise. If a phrase must be one, it at least shouldn’t be the other.

It's Not You, It's Your Books

April 4, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’m sure that by now every book blogger has linked to It’s Not You, It’s Your Books in The New York Times. It’s hilarious, and I essentially agree with Beverly West except with the genders reversed:

After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.”

Finding someone who likes to read is one way of avoiding the bigger problem discussed in the next paragraph:

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

Nabokov seems like a needlessly high test of literary taste, like demanding that a significant other not only be athletic, but participate in marathons. The purported link between fiction and empathy deserves a note too, since it might be used to justify otherwise almost sadistic requirement for literary knowledge and pleasure.

It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

April 4, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I’m sure that by now every book blogger has linked to It’s Not You, It’s Your Books in The New York Times. It’s hilarious, and I essentially agree with Beverly West except with the genders reversed:

After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.”

Finding someone who likes to read is one way of avoiding the bigger problem discussed in the next paragraph:

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book.”

Nabokov seems like a needlessly high test of literary taste, like demanding that a significant other not only be athletic, but participate in marathons. The purported link between fiction and empathy deserves a note too, since it might be used to justify otherwise almost sadistic requirement for literary knowledge and pleasure.

NYT on point about memoirs and Seattle

March 10, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Buying the paper version of the New York Times was an excellent decision, with “Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?” about Seattle’s supposed position as literary tastemaker:

In many ways, Ms. [Nancy] Pearl’s rise in the book world parallels Seattle’s rise in the publishing world. Though the big publishing houses are still ensconced in New York, the Seattle area is the home of Amazon, Starbucks and Costco, three companies that increasingly influence what America reads.

I’m not sure that I buy the premise of this article, though I do note that it implicitly argues that the success of the three companies might be harming what makes Seattle unusual in the first place:

Seattle’s literary seeds have been here for decades, with local authors, abundant writing courses and robust independent bookstores, according to J. A. Jance, the Seattle mystery author whose books have sold 15 million copies over the last 20 years. “Maybe it’s the rain, but Seattle has always been a reading town,” she said.

[…]

The flip side of the success of the big Seattle booksellers is the gradual decrease in the number of small independent stores, which have struggled as a result of a variety of factors.

(Bold added.)

Elsewhere, the little league tizzy over a faked memoir (see our comments here and, to a lesser extent, here) brings “A Bug’s Life. Really.“:

“‘The Metamorphosis’ — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,” according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.

[…]

Mr. Kafka’s publishers are now reviewing all his works of fiction — stories about singing mice, “hunger artists” and men on trial for crimes they’re not aware of having committed — to determine whether they too are true.

We’ve come to the point of observing the absurdity of memoirs through the absurdity of such standards applied to absurd fiction.

Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely

February 26, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 11 Comments

One of the central tenets of economics is that we behave rationally, and yet much of what we see on a day-to-day basis defies rationality like some Modernists defy the conventions of plot. We become irrationally attached to concepts like “free,” even if something else is a better value, and our price preferences are relative: experiments in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational show that we’re willing to forgo what seems to be a better deal just so we don’t have to risk even tiny amounts of money. These tendencies can be manipulated to some extent; Ariely says that the main lesson that could be distilled is that “we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend.” I disagree with the chess metaphor, as it seems to deny us the will and ability we have to learn about the game and not move forward just one square at a time, but the thought it expresses is accurate, and throughout the book I could think of parallel examples to the ones Ariely gives. We don’t see the blindness in others as well as ourselves, and we become attached to prices, things or ideas.

I remember turning 21 and being able to drink legally for the first time and being shocked at the price of going to bars; parties in college and high school usually charged three to five dollars for a cup and as much beer as you could drink. Girls got in free. If the door guy raised the price from three to five, I would try negotiating and sometimes leave. If I came with a group of attractive girls, which wasn’t often, I’d sometimes get in free. In contrast, at bars five dollars only gets you the first beer; to be fair, however, that beer is usually of higher quality than keg beer. Nonetheless, the price increase of an evening out caused much consternation at first, but now I’ve acclimated to the idea that, although Ariely says “[…] first decisions resonate over a long sequence of decisions,” I also use anchoring points in my price expectation continuum. Now paying $15 to $20 at a bar seems normal and $5 at a party would seem cheap. These “anchors” can change over time and with context. If I went to New York or L.A., where trendy bars allegedly now charge $15 a drink, I’d be astonished. When I was a freshman in college and a New York club accidentally gave me a band that allowed me to drink even though I was 18, I was shocked at having to pay $10 per drink and consequently didn’t drink much, even when a 23-year-old girl wanted to get me to buy shots. Buying her shots isn’t a good idea for reasons Richard Feynman goes into in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Nonetheless, I’m wandering far afield from the central point, which is that original decisions about price can resonate powerfully over time and can be hard to change.

Ariely uses Starbucks versus Dunkin’ Donuts as an example: Dunkin’ Donuts coffee was and probably still is much less expensive than Starbucks and, I would argue, not much worse if it is at all, but Starbucks still manages to charge millions of people three or more dollars for various drinks. They can do so in part because they’ve changed expectation through decor, drink names, and the like. “Starbucks did everything in its power […] to make the experience feel different—so different that we would not use the prices at Dunkin’ Donuts as an anchor, but instead would be open to the new anchor that Starbucks was preparing for us.” In other words, Starbucks created a new anchor. This raises fundamental questions about the nature of things like supply and demand—or, as Ariely says, “As our experiments demonstrate, what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don’t in fact have a good handle of their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.” I agree to some extent, as I didn’t like paying extra money to go to bars and avoided it to the extent I could when I first turned 21, but now all my friends go and they’ve become the new norm. In the land of companies, Apple might be the best example of a company manipulating consumer expectations: only its operating system and industrial design separates it from other manufacturers, and yet it can get away with offering unusual machines and limited, premium product lineup.

I wonder if Ariely has read Trading Up: The New American Luxury, which describes how some companies are trying to harness these price point anchors—and redefine them. One point of Trading Up, however, is that the new or luxury products must have at least some technical advantage of what they replace. Starbucks does: it offered espresso drinks when, to my knowledge, they were not readily available at most places. Not surprisingly, the book also covers Apple and BMW. Apple offers a real technical advantage to me in the form of OS X, but you can’t buy a regular desktop tower and separate monitor. Where Apple does compete it offers hardware at prices similar to competitors, but you can’t get low-cost towers stripped of the computer equivalent of bells and whistles. In addition, this morning Apple released new versions of its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The base-level MacBook is $1,100—or, thanks to Apple’s marketing, $1,099—but comes without a DVD burner, an extra gigabyte (GB) of RAM, and the extra 40 GB hard drive. Its processor is also slower. Given these drawbacks, it makes sense to buy the $1,300 version—but Apple’s website touts that the MacBook starts at $1,099. Yet buying the middle version is better, for resale value if no other reason. In doing so, the company might have differentiated itself enough to set new anchors for many consumers. And we either fall for it or make a rational choice, depending on one’s perspective.

Ariely doesn’t specifically cover Apple because he’s more interested in experiments where you have two things that are absolute equivalents, rather than OS X versus Windows. But I begin to see examples of some of his thinking in the world I see. There are limits to manipulation—I won’t pay $10 for coffee or $2,000 for any computer with the capabilities of a present-day MacBook. But I might pay marginally more for some products, like beer, depending on the setting and my age. In addition, product preferences change; in Ariely’s next chapter, “The cost of zero cost,” he describes how people will often take free even when it appears to be a better value to take money. He offered a $10 Amazon gift certificate for free or a $20 gift certificate for seven dollars. Buying the larger certificate nets more profit, but most people take the free one. To conventional economics, this would seem irrational, but for some people an Amazon gift certificate might not be of as much use as cash; they might not read much, or want to buy DVDs, and the like. In essence, I believe their demand is lower on the demand curve for Amazon products. I would take the $20 certificate because I buy too much from them already. In addition, he describes how Amazon’s free shipping policies can cause people to buy more than they would otherwise to reach the $25 free shipping threshold, but I often will add an extra book to reach it because I always have a backlog waiting. Not all those who act in response to Amazon’s offer act irrationally.

Still, the issues of Amazon gift certificates and free shipping are mostly nitpicks. My bigger question concerns some of his methods for generating data—many of the stories and anecdotes come from experimenting on convenient undergraduates at good Universities, who might not be representatives of the general population. Though he follows up many with experiments elsewhere, I’m still leery of drawing overly broad conclusions based on limited samples. In addition, how reliably can we extrapolate data from a limited number of people in artificial settings and then apply it to the bigger world? Posing the question is much easier than answering it, and to Ariely’s credit he has given us a framework for exploring the issue, while I throw popcorn from the sidelines and offer stories about drinking. But the issues are real, and there’s a perpetual danger of finding a correlation that works only to discover that some other variable drives the correlations or causes experiments to turn out as they do. Will our tendency to cheat and steal more when dealing with abstractions for cash rather than cash itself, as Ariely describes in “The context of our character, Part II,” really scale up to the level of Enron-style fraud? He makes a convincing case, but not one beyond all reasonable doubt, even if I can certainly agree that he meets the lower legal standard of a preponderance of the evidence.

And even if some of his conclusions make you go, “Really?”, his book is still fun to read. The chapters I discussed in-depth were just a small part of Predictably Irrational, and to give every chapter the same treatment would lead to a document almost as long as his book. But maybe I’m inclined to like his book more because Tim Harford recommend it (in addition, Ariely sent me an e-mail about my Harford post, and, as often happens with famous authors, I have a slight tendency towards being star-struck. But I can also admit that, perhaps alleviating some of its effects). In “The effect of expectations,” he describes experiments that show “When we believe beforehand that something will be good, therefore, it generally will be good—and when we think it will be bad, it will be bad.” He finds the influences go deep, and that signaling that an experience will be good can often make it good. Compare this, however, to Chris Matthews’ advice that one was better served by setting expectations low and exceeding them than setting them high and missing, even if the ultimate result was the same. He discussed politics, however, and Ariely is describing, well, something more domestic and more grand at the same time. I feel like there is a way to reconcile the views even if I have not found it yet, and it might speak to the depth of both writers that I have not been able to (incidentally, you should read Mattews’ Hardball).

Harford’s signal that this book will be good has an impact on the pleasure I derive from reading it, and I can’t help comparing The Logic of Life and Predictably Irrational, given their similar subject matter and proximity in both publishing date and my reading. Arguably, Harford is the better writer, with more journalistic zing, but this tendency also gets him into trouble: he jumps without transitions from idea to idea too often, and his chapters seem more loosely linked than Ariely’s. To be sure, both books are similar in that their chapters are more or less independent, but Ariely’s passes what I now call “the blog test” in that its content doesn’t seem to have been replicated on blogs and its form is not necessarily better suited to that medium. The buffet approach in Predictably Irrational by its nature lacks total coherence, but also allows one to skip chapters at will and not lose much. It also makes generalizing about an entire book more difficult, which is why I focused on particular chapters. The largest difference between The Logic of Life and Predictably Irrational is that the former makes the case for logic and rationality in a larger, social, macro sense, while the latter makes the case for irrationality in a smaller, individual, micro sense. And yet I can’t help but wonder if the latter approach supports the former approach, much the same way that the self-interest of capitalism might end up altruistically benefitting society on a large scale, or the way we might not be able to predict how an individual will act but can sometimes guess how large bodies of individuals turn out. Take two people with different SAT scores and you can’t know that one will do better than the other, but take 100,000 people with very different scores and you’ll know that most of the top group will outperform most of the bottom. So too, maybe, with Ariely’s Predictably Irrational on the small scale and Harford’s The Logic of Life on the larger. Both books also have a self-help aspect to them in that if you can understand your own weakness and how others will behave, you’ll be more likely to correct those weaknesses and exploit them in others. Of course, if enough people read both books, then their behavior could change en masse, leading to the books changing what they seek to measure, but this seems unlikely. Ariely knows about the issues with weakness, too: “[…] these results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommittment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it.”

Perhaps that is also true of readers of what I call, tongue-in-cheek, econ-for-dummies books.

Many of Ariely’s chapters are structured like this post: they tell a story, conduct an experiment, and then draw more general conclusions. The story could be a personal one from Ariely or drawn from another source. In my case, I tell a story, link it to Ariely’s experiments, and then draw a more general conclusion about his book and methods. Mostly, I suspect his book shows that we don’t really know what we want, which probably shouldn’t be a surprise given all the lonely hearts columns, uncertainty, regret, and the like we collectively experience. As such, it helps us better evaluate what we want and why we act the way we do, and that the book is fun to read helps as well. And it has enough substance to fuel more than 2,000 words of commentary and analysis.

NOTE: Ariely will be in Seattle tomorrow night, and I’ll be at Town Hall to hear him.For more about Ariely and behavioral economics, read What Was I Thinking? The latest reasoning about our irrational ways, an excellent New Yorker article, or this much shorter post on Marginal Revolution. Finally, the Economist’s Free Exchange has a very negative review that I think is wrong, as my comments above should illustrate. Its biggest complaint seems to be that Ariely doesn’t define what he means by rational, but if the writer missed that, I’m not sure he understood the book.For a descriptive but positive view, see The New York Times’ story, which is in the science rather than books section.EDIT: Dan Ariely’s visit was excellent, and I wrote about it here.

The New York Times on the Kindle

January 26, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A New York Times article called “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless” discusses the Amazon Kindle, which I don’t like. But I agree with the article’s conclusion:

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

I just analogize the Kindle to mp3 players before the iPod in the sense that it shows promise but just isn’t there yet. When it is there—less expensive, better interface, easier content management and acquisition (and what a vile phrase that is)—I will be too.