Omnivoracious

Nixonland, or an Empty Parenthesis?: Author One-on-One: John Dean

I like the sampling of bookshelves this site has collected. For a fleeting moment I thought about taking a picture of my bookshelf (actually three shelves in our den which my wife lets me use for my current reading crop for she too is a voracious reader and she correctly points out that I have more than monopolized the walls of our house and my office). But when I looked at my shelves and spotted several works by authors whose sagacity (nay, sanity) I truly doubt but whose books I read to understand their warped and weird political thinking, I feared the picture might suggest to others to consider these works. So no shelf picture and on with more important business.

The New York Times Book Review published George Will's cover review of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, which I'll address shortly. But first I am wondering if others spotted the note in the "Up Front" section of the Times review, where "The Editors" discussed their exchange with George Will?  It seems they asked him how "Nixon fit into the larger story of modern conservatism?" Will answered: "He doesn't. His tenure was an empty parenthesis." 

If Nixon has no part in modern conservatism, why have conservatives embraced so many Nixonian governing techniques? Starting with the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and accelerating their efforts with the Bush II/Cheney administration, conservatives have revived and expanded everything from Nixon's imperial presidency (in the name of national security just like Nixon) to blatant abuses of constitutional limitations--not to mention countless statutes--that make Nixon look now like a piker. Nixon famously believed, of course, that if a president did it, that made it legal. Bush and Cheney, and their conservative cohorts, have proved Nixon's point yet gone way beyond it, for in his darkest moment I do not believe Nixon would ever have tortured enemies. 

Actually, when I read Will's review, I understood why he likes to think of Nixon's contribution to conservatism as an empty parenthesis. Nixon has about him a Pandora of evils that I suspect Will (and many conservatives) would rather that astute young historians like Perlstein keep boxed. This may explain why Will thinks that Perlstein has not lived up to his prior work in Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. But I must differ with Will. For me, Nixonland is even better. Both Will and I, no doubt, are too close to Nixonland's years--albeit viewing them from very different vantage points--to fully appreciate how the fresh eyes of a young historian might see it. But suffice it to say I found the portrait Perlstein has painted both fascinating and revealing, and to my knowledge very accurate.

I was disappointed in Will's review not because he does not much like what emerged from Perlstein's efforts, rather because he seeks to discredit the author's works by selecting examples of purported errors.  For example, Will takes issue with Perlstein quoting a Military Policeman who thought B-52 co-pilots were carrying side arms to deal with a co-pilot "too chicken to follow orders and drop the big one." Will found the language adolescent, and said that "an Air Force historian laughed" at the notion. (In fact the language makes the point, and this historian's laugh is a non-denial denial, not to mention the fact that B-52 pilots were often armed.) Perlstein, however, did not quote the MP for his facts, rather his state of mind.

Will next says Perlstein was wrong to state that "before the Kent State violence, 'citizens were thrilled to see tanks and jeeps rumbling through town'" because there were no tanks. Yet a simple and quick Google search shows no less than four eyewitnesses reported tanks at the scene. Similarly, Will says Perlstein is wrong in writing (and citing) the story that "Hells Angels beat hippies to death with pool cues" at the 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, California, yet countless stories produced by a Google search corroborate Perlstein. This snarky nit picking goes on until Will reaches his claim that the "cumulative effect of carelessness, solecism and rhetorical fireworks is to make Perlstein seem eager to portray the years and people about whom he is writing as even wilder and nastier than they were." [Emphasis added.]

In fact, Perlstein has not made them wilder or nastier than they were. (Based on his review, I am not sure George Will believes this either.) To the contrary. Perlstein has painted a careful, realistic, and vivid picture of the times and characters.

His assertion that Perlstein's work is "careless" is simply not true, as any careful reader (or inquiring mind) will discover, for there are almost 100 pages of documentation supporting the material in great detail. In fact, when I agreed to do this blog--after earlier reading the book in bound galleys and being impressed by the care and detail (and analysis) in undertaking what had to be a massive research job--I sent word I would like to talk about the author's research techniques in getting his head around, and into, this massive body of information. (A subject I will address with a subsequent blog for I am interested as both an author and reader.)

As for Will's charge of "solecism," I can find none in Perlstein's work although I cannot say the same for George Will's review in making false charges about Perlstein's facts. He should try Google occasionally.

Finally, as for Will's trouble with the "rhetorical fireworks," early in his review he found the work "rollicking," noting that "Perlstein's high-energy--sometimes too energetic--romp of a book also serves, inadvertently, a serious need: it corrects the cultural hypochondria to which many Americans, including Perlstein, are prone"--whatever "cultural hypochondria" involves. And Will closed his review by calling Perlstein's chronicle of the Nixon years "compulsively readable"--and on this I agree. Rick's occasional "rhetorical fireworks" are merely part of the show. --John Dean

Are We Still in Nixonland?: Author One-on-One: Rick Perlstein and John Dean

We live in interesting times, for better or worse, but I must confess I find the times from the early 60s to the early 70s at least as interesting as ours. Everything seemed at stake, and everything was in flux. Mass movements changed things from the ground up, and flawed but fascinating figures at the top made courageous and tragic decisions (often in the same moment) whose effects we're still living with. But you don't need me to tell you about those years--we've been hearing about them (and hearing about them) ever since.

Which might make a new history of the era seem superfluous, even to a mild obsessive like me. But when the fat advance copy of Rick Perlstein's Nixonland hit my desk, I could tell it would be something special. For one thing, Perlstein had an excellent reputation from his first book, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which was acclaimed on both sides of the aisle for showing how the Goldwater presidential run in 1964, commonly considered an unmitigated disaster, actually laid the groundwork for the conservative movement that has dominated American politics for most of the past three decades. (By the way, Before the Storm is unaccountably out of print right now--a new edition is due out next spring, but for now you'll have to spend over $100 for a used copy on our site.) I was looking forward to seeing that perspective turned on the more familiar terrain of the Nixon years. And then there's the style of Nixonland: from a few random glances you could tell that it's written with a verve and glee that you don't expect from political history. And the book itself lived up to those early signs: dense with research that puts familiar events on the same plane with forgotten ones and full of a spirit that reminds you of one of his theses, that politics is always an emotional and visceral game, never more so than in times of massive and disorienting change. I made it my Best of the Month pick and even steamrolled my less-obsessed colleagues into making it our May Spotlight selection.

I wanted to bring Perlstein into dialogue on Omni, and I thought a perfect match for him would be former Nixon aide John Dean: in part because he lived at the center of many of the books' events (although the book ends with the '72 election, before Dean was on television sets across the country as the star of the Watergate hearings), but even more so because he's been a student of conservatism as well, and has held to his own identity as a "Goldwater conservative" even as, by his own reckoning, the shifting of the political spectrum has put someone like him much farther to the left than he'd ever have imagined. His newest book, following recent bestsellers like Worse than Watergate and Conservatives Without Conscience (not to mention his original bestseller and one of my all-time favorite political books, the memoir Blind Ambition), is Pure Goldwater, a collection, edited with Barry Goldwater Jr., of the late senator's journal entries and correspondence, which I hope will help lead the discussion toward Perlstein's first book and the Goldwater brand of conservatism as well.

Dean and Perlstein will be taking turns blogging here over the next couple of weeks. Dean begins things with a post this afternoon, which is a direct response to George Will's cover piece on Nixonland yesterday in the New York Times Book Review. May the rest of the discussion continue to be so lively! --Tom

Guest Blogging: James Frey

As you may have noticed, our May guest blogging has already begun, with an author who has been out of the limelight for a while but is back with a big novel this month, James Frey. Or, as he may feel his nickname is by now, "Yes, That James Frey" (not to be confused, old Cubs and Earl Weaver fans, with this James Frey). You don't need me to fill you in on the backstory, or to supply you with an opinion on it, since you most likely have one already. But I should note that, despite all the hoo-ha, A Million Little Pieces still sells at a very healthy clip on our site, and still gets enthusiastic new customer reviews (for instance, JazzDroid's "poo poo on the naysayers") from readers who came to the book after it had started being packaged with a giant grain of salt. (Also of note: we picked it as our top book of the year back in those quiet, pre-Oprah days of 2003.)

And now, to cut through all the noise, we have James himself, sitting in for a month here. With our previous guests we've gone with a once-a-week posting schedule, but James wanted to stop by more frequently (as he has already), so we can look forward to regular updates from what will no doubt be a crazy month. He's spent these past few years working on his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning, which our own Daphne Durham has called a "swift and sprawling portrait of Los Angeles." It comes out May 13, and, as James mentioned in his first post, he's doing a somewhat untraditional book tour--although  from what he's told us about some of the plans, his description of "other writers reading with me, projected images, music, lights, live bands" may be a bit of an understatement. We're looking forward to seeing what happens, and we're glad James is able to join us this month. --Tom

P.S. To see more portraits of Los Angeles, take a look at James's annotated list of his top 12 books about LA, from classics like Chandler and Nathanael West to Bruce Wagner and "the first, and maybe only, truly great surfing novel," Tapping the Source.

P.P.S. Stay tuned for what's shaping up to be a busy and exciting month for authors on Omni, with guest appearances, starting next week, from multimedia triple-threat Miranda July and graphic design superstar Stefan Sagmeister as well as our second Author One-on-One, a discussion between Nixonland author Rick Perlstein and a former inner-circle resident of Nixonland (and current bestselling author) John Dean.

Now It's Time for the Group Hug (Author One-on-One: Tim Harford)

Like Dan, I have enjoyed this discussion very much, and I hope that's true of Omnivoracious readers. It has been hard work--in a good way--and forced me to think carefully.

Let me finish by writing a bit about a subject I've been thinking about recently--it might help us find a bit of common ground and show why this discussion is important. Let's think about the problem of climate change, which is widely believed to require us to cut back a lot on our emissions of carbon dioxide. So what should we do?

Standard economics has a solution: a carbon tax, or a tradable permit scheme, to raise the cost of emitting carbon. We'd all have an incentive to cut down by driving less and turning down the heating or air conditioning, and also by insulating our homes and finding more efficient cars and fridges. Businesses would also cut back, and would have an incentive to develop new technologies.

Behavioral economics draws attention to different considerations. For example, we're not as smart as conventional economics assumes, which means that we might fail to notice ways to reduce our energy bills. We might also need to be reminded about what our neighbors are doing: psychologist Robert Cialdini showed that we're more likely to recycle if we think everyone's doing it. That may hold true for carbon-saving too. And although we're reminded of high gas prices every time we fill up, we really need to be reminded of them when we're buying a new car or a new fridge.

So which approach is right? That's a strange question. They can both be right, and I think that they both are.

Of course, the economic incentives will work. I don't think there's any serious doubt that raising the price of carbon would persuade us to pollute less. The Logic of Life showed that we are sensitive to these simple incentives in the most unexpected situations. For instance, raising the risk of unprotected sex persuaded American teens to have more oral sex instead; and two Australian economists, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, have found that tax incentives can persuade pregnant women to delay labor, and even deter people from dying too quickly. (It's really true: the death rate in Australia dropped in the week before inheritance tax was due to be abolished, and then sharply rose the week immediately after. A lot of people were clinging on to life to avoid their estates being taxed.) If people will change their date of death or the day they have a baby in response to a tax incentive, I am quite sure that they will be more environmentally friendly, too.

But I am also sure the behavioral insights will produce results. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler report one dramatic success: people cut back dramatically if the electricity company gives them an "Ambient Orb" that glows red when they're using a lot of power. There's no standard economic theory that explains why that should be; and that is just one example.

So we need insights from both economics and psychology to make the world a better place. And I know that Dan will agree with me when I say that whatever we try, we should be checking carefully to see whether the idea is working as predicted, because the world is full of surprises.

Thanks to all Omnivoracious readers for dropping in on our debate.

Your logical friend,
Tim Harford

1984 in 2008: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

This week marks the publication of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which as we reported here last month is a young adult novel that functions in part as a correction and update of such dystopic novels as 1984 and Brave New World. Except here the hero is Marcus, a smart seventeen year old caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. Picked up by homeland security, interrogated brutally, and then released, Marcus finds himself in a world where fear rules and every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. Marcus has a choice to make--and he decides to fight back. Doctorow has wedded his fascination with cutting-edge technology and the choices we make about technology to a riveting suspense plot in this potentially controversial novel.

Reviews and previews are all over the internet, of course. Ed Park in the LA Times writes that Doctorow is "terrific at finding the human aura shimmering around technology." SFF World believes the novel will "only further reinforce Cory Doctorow’s presence as one of the visionaries of free speech advocacy and great storytelling in the twenty-first century." Strange Horizons comments on the distinction Doctorow draws between privacy versus security: "Doctorow offers a distinction between the two which I am still pondering. He suggests that privacy is individual, with no implications of power over anyone else. Secrecy, in emulation of the old formula ('power + prejudice = racism') can then be framed as power + privacy = secrecy. Secrecy is what you do to others; it is withholding information or demanding access to another's privacy, or demanding of others that they keep 'private' something you have done to them."

A Publishers Weekly feature that ran in January suggested that "Time will tell if the book’s political awareness and tech-savvy will resonate with readers (teen or otherwise), but [Patrick] Nielsen-Hayden [Doctorow's editor] hopes that it will inspire them to become more active and involved. 'It’s not a call for anarchy in the streets,' he says, 'but it is a call for a more reasonable social order.'" Nielsen-Hayden shares more thoughts about Little Brother on the Making Light blog.

Doctorow also talks generally about SF and young readers at the website for a new YA anthology, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Tonight he's in Toronto to kick off his book tour. Check out the reviews and check out the novel--you'll be glad you did.

"When You're Born Into It": Margaret B. Jones's Unearthed Video

Pardon me for piling on but, well, I find it riveting to watch somebody just flat-out lie. Harry Allen at Media Assassin (yes, that "media assassin / Harry Allen") has obtained what appears to be a promo video shot with Margaret B. Jones--er, Peggy Seltzer's faux South Central memoir, Love and Consequences. Have at it (and read Allen's blow-by-blow critique):

(Via GalleyCat. Meanwhile, Ron at GalleyCat has been running an excellent series of posts about the endless trend toward using photos of women facing away from the camera on the covers of women's fiction, but, surprisingly, this now-notorious cover has not come up. Even if "Jones"'s story had been true I wouldn't have expected the cover photo to actually be of Jones and her adoptive "Big Mom," but does it strike anyone else as odd to be using stock photos on the cover of a memoir?) --Tom

Suffering Succotash, Why You Little Bleep!

You could burn your ears several times over reading aloud from Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, edited by R.V. Branham (and brought to you by the ever-cheeky Soft Skull Press). It's so filthy and rife with controversy, I can't possibly quote from the book itself, except, possibly, from the introduction, in which Branham raises a series of questions, then answered in footnotes so the easily offended won't jump out of their chairs: "What insult has the most time zones, and what is the language of this insult? And what is the most common insult south of the Kush, in south Asia? What was Vladimir Lenin's favorite word?" No, it was not "hushpuppy," "whimsical," or "contented." Instead, it was something that would sear your grandma's eyebrows right off.

I should probably leave it there, though, and let the more adventurous @#&*%! Amazon readers discover more on their own.

Designing for the Real, Irrational World (Author One-on-One: Dan Ariely)

Dear Reader,

If you have examined the debate between Tim and myself over the past few weeks, you must have realized that, in fact, Tim and I agree on many things. Particularly, that our respective perspectives are not the only useful ones (although we each believe that our individual perspective is more useful than the other's).

However, one major disagreement that Tim and I do have is about the weight of the evidence that supports the other's position. In general, Tim doesn't see how the results from lab experiments translate to the "real world." In essence, he does not believe that these lab-based irrationalities become full-fledged irrationalities outside of the lab. I, on the other hand don't see how the results from many of the statistical analyses he and others report necessarily demonstrate that people are rational. I do see how these studies show that people react to incentives in a way that is compatible with economic theory, and that they are sensitive to the general structure of the economic environment (and psychologists and behavioral economists would say that people should react to these), but I don't see the evidence that people react to these in an optimal way--in a rational way. I hope that Tim can explain this to me in our next exchange, but in the meantime I want to answer the two questions he posed for me in his last post.

At the end of his YouTube video (and by the way Tim has one other great video on YouTube) Tim posed the following two questions:

1. How can we take the insights from behavioral economics and apply them to economics?
2. How can we the apply insights from behavioral economics to make real changes in the real world?

Let me try to give my perspective on both of these questions. In terms of applying the insights from behavioral economics to economics: I don't see this as the goal of behavioral economics, I don't expect that we will ever be able to successfully achieve this integration and in fact, I don't want to "fix" economics. I think economics is beautiful, interesting, and that it has provided us with many useful insights. So where do my objections to standard economics come from? It comes from Tim's second question about using insights to change the world. Here I think that relying blindly on standard economics is dangerous, and behavioral economics has oodles to contribute.

When it comes to making changes in the world, such as laws, policies, or even business and individual practices, standard economics assumes/claims that it can provide the correct and complete answer. The answer! After all if people are rational then what else is there to take into consideration? This is what welfare analysis and the Chicago school of economics is all about. This is also what bothers me about economics, and what I would like to change. If it were up to me, economics would remain as it is in terms of an academic discipline, but we would consider other perspectives, including behavioral economics, when making recommendations for implementing changes in the world. Moreover, I want us to take to heart one of the main lessons of behavioral economics--that our intuitions are not always correct. By doing so, instead of just implementing a policy based on our intuition, we should first experimentally test our ideas to ensure that we are getting what we expect.

To better understand the role that behavioral economics can play in the design of everyday life consider the following analogy: When we design physical products such as phones, cars, and pens, we carefully consider our physical limitations. We don't design products for Superman, and by taking our physical limitations into account we are able to design better products, and live a better life. Why not do the same for products that rely on our cognitive abilities such as mortgages, health insurance, and saving plans? Why don't we learn to recognize our cognitive limitations and by doing so, design products that better fit our actual ability? This is the promise of behavioral economics--once we recognize our cognitive limitations we can design the world in such a way that it will not demand from us the type of computations that we simply cannot do.

So Tim, if we want to live in a world with less financial crisis, better health, and higher savings, then we must apply insights from behavioral economics to make changes in the real world.

Irrationally yours,
Dan

The Laboratory and the Real World (Author One-on-One: Tim Harford)

[Ed.: And now Tim Harford has picked up his camera to reply to Dan Ariely in kind. See the full discussion here.]

The Rational Economist on the Couch (Author One-on-One: Dan Ariely)

[Ed.: Dan Ariely has chosen to make this week's response in his discussion with Tim Harford via YouTube. Enjoy.]

Teenagers Rational About Sex? (Author One-on-One: Tim Harford)

Dan, thanks for the kind comments about The Logic of Life. Anyone who read my Financial Times review of Predictably Irrational will know that the admiration is mutual.

Let me just make one small correction: I certainly don't say that high CEO pay is desirable; I think it grotesque. Half that chapter is devoted to explaining why--why can a system full of rational shareholders can deliver grotesque pay packets?

Now, let's discuss the central question: are human beings rational or irrational? Perhaps the best way to understand the different perspectives of the books is through an example, and since the sexual examples in both books have captured everybody's attention, I'll compare and contrast.

Dan wants to know whether our behavior changes when we're sexually aroused and more importantly, whether we are caught by surprise when it does. As always, his approach is to run an experiment, and he paints a picture that will forever be etched in my memory, of students masturbating over Saran-wrapped laptops, while answering multiple choice questions about whether they would use condoms, consider using date rape drugs, have sex with animals... (In case you're wondering, no, this kind of subject matter is not the only reason that Predictably Irrational has been a runaway success.)

What does he find? First, that his subjects give very different answers to these questions when in a calm frame of mind than they did when sexually excited. Second, that they did not predict the way their answers would change. Now, one could argue about this research. Maybe the Saran-wrapped laptop is not a good substitute for a real sexual encounter. Maybe the pornography did not change the subjects' preferences, but merely encouraged them to be more honest. But basically, I buy it. The research seems sound, and Dan's witty description of it is pretty unforgettable.

So, how is The Logic of Life different in the way it approaches this topic? I take a bird's eye view of the whole controversy over the so-called "teen oral sex epidemic"; I find out that, behind the hype, yes, teenagers are having more oral sex than they used to. But I also find that they are losing their virginities later and are more likely to use condoms. That isn't so much an oral sex epidemic as a safe sex epidemic. I argue, informally, that this would be a rational response of a typical teenager to increased education about pregnancy and particularly to the now near-universal knowledge of the threat of HIV/AIDS. (You can read a short article I wrote about all this in Slate. You can also see what Stephen Colbert made of it all here.)

Fine. But that's still a bit speculative. So then I look at some of the latest evidence from economics, which shows that state by state, when state legislatures introduce laws tightening up on the availability of abortion to teenagers, the rates of sexual infections in teenagers falls in those states, relative to that of adults. That shows that teens are switching to safer sex, or abstinence. This isn't some vague correlation (more conservative states = less risky sex) but a specific response from teenagers to laws that affected only teenagers.

"But that's rational!" spluttered one venerable journalist, when I told him about this. Well, yes--it seems so, doesn't it?

Okay--who's right? When you see both examples set against each other you realize that's not a smart question. Dan explains that our behavior changes when we're excited; I explain that teenagers have safer sex if a legal change increases the consequences of pregnancy. Obviously both those things could be true at the same time. I believe that both of them are true.

At the risk of making this seem like a big group hug in which everyone is right about everything, let me raise a point of disagreement. The Logic of Life leans on all kinds of evidence, everything from the kind of careful statistical work I describe above to the use of lab rats. Theory counts too, and so does the clever simulation work inspired by the likes of Thomas Schelling. Every type of evidence has its flaws. I think the weaknesses inherent in pure theory are obvious; so, too, are the weaknesses of the sort of data-detective work very common on modern economics. (I will let Dan say more about those weaknesses if he wants to.)

But the weaknesses of laboratory experiments are not always quite so evident, especially when they are described as compellingly as in Predictably Irrational. So, let me point them out. While laboratory experiments are great for creating controlled conditions, they also create artificial conditions. There are several examples of important clashes between what happens in the laboratory and what happens outside. We know, for example, that procurement managers systematically screw up when bidding in a laboratory auction, but they do much better job in the (apparently identical) real life auctions situations they face everyday.

The economist John List has tried to replicate some famous "predictably irrational" results from the laboratory; the results tend to evaporate in more realistic settings. In one example I describe in The Logic of Life, List shows that the "irrational" result (which is that people given an unexpected raise work much harder than they could get away with) only lasts for ninety minutes. A gratitude effect that lasts ninety minutes is not the basis on which to rewrite your company's human resources policy.

I'm not aware that any of Dan's experiments have been challenged in this way, and I was pleased to see that he often tried to carry out his work in realistic settings such as restaurants and bars. So this isn't an attack on his work--it's more of a question. Dan, how can we be confident that these experimental results hold up in real life? And what further work would you like to see, to make us more confident in them?

Your logical friend,

Tim

Rational or Irrational: The Logic of Life or Predictably Irrational? (Author One-on-One: Dan Ariely)

The Logic of Life is a wonderful book. In prose that is witty and entertaining, Tim Harford uses his keen economist's perspective to peel away the layers from a variety of unconventional examples, revealing the unexpected rationalities that lie at the hearts of subjects such as large executive salaries, smoking, and even racism. His exploration of these subjects enables the reader to understand how economists think, and the logic that often lies beneath the surface.

Take for example the case of executive pay. As Harford explains, there are some interesting economic principles underlying what we might otherwise consider exuberant CEO salaries (for example the $800 million that Disney paid Michael Eisner over his 13 years of service as Disney's CEO). First, Harford argues that very high salaries are desirable because they cause the executives to have more skin in the game and, as a consequence, will care more about their company. Harford also points out that these high salaries are not only intended to motivate the person who is getting the high salary, as they are also intended to motivate the people below them who might pull all-nighters for years and work much harder in hopes of one day attaining that enviable position. (Harford proposes a clever test of this idea in which the CEO doesn't do any work, making his position even more enviable.) Finally, Harford also points to the rational selfishness of the CEOs, the difficulty of tracking their actions, and the mysteries of accounting as other ways in which CEOs further increase their salaries.

These are very interesting ideas with a compelling and fascinating logic (although they are not very well tested from an empirical perspective). In my mind this is economic theory at its best. Beautiful, elegant, requiring some convoluted logic, and shedding light on what we see in the world around us.

What should we do with these insights from economics? If we trust the rational economic perspective completely, we should take steps to pay CEOs more, maybe give them more vacation time or pay them even more with stock options. But here is the catch: in order to move from a perspective that sheds light onto the question of CEO pay to an action plan that we can adopt wholeheartedly, we must not only believe in these principles, but we must also believe that nothing else matters (or at least that nothing else would make a big difference). So, should we trust that our powers of logical reasoning could provide us with a complete understanding of the role of incentives? The field of behavioral economics suggests that we should not rush to make this assumption and that, in fact, there are many forces that influence us without our understanding.

Let me give you an example. Imagine that I described to you some puzzles of different sorts that required memory, concentration, thinking, and creativity. Suppose I then asked you to predict how well people would perform on these games if they were promised a payment that depended on their performance. I would also tell you that for some people the payment was equivalent to 1.5 days of their income, for others it was equivalent to 2 weeks of their income, and for a third group it was equivalent to 6 months of their income. Who would you predict would do the best? If you are anything like the real participants in our experiments, you would predict the third group--the one with the highest pay--would have the highest level of performance.

When we ran this experiment (in India where we could pay people this much without completely depleting our research accounts) we found that participants did the worst when they were offered the highest pay. It turns out that money is a double-edged sword: it is a motivator but it is also a stressor. To get a better insight about this idea, imagine that I offered you $10,000 to come up with a creative idea in the next 5 minutes. How focused would you be on the creativity task and how stressed would you be? How much time would you dedicate to coming up with an idea and how much time would you spend thinking about the money that you are not going to get?

What is the big idea here? First, it turns out that incentives are a bit more interesting and complex than standard economics would have us believe--sometimes we can pay more and get worse performance. Second, it appears that our intuitions and logic are sometimes inaccurate in their ability to predicting human behavior. What does this say about relying on standard economics and pure logic as a tool to guide the type of incentive mechanisms we create? It tells us that when we try to understand these mechanisms, and in particular when we make recommendations for how these mechanisms should be designed (which is something economists do often), we should take all the input we can into account, including our irrational characteristics. Standard economics and logic can help us create systems that are useful for perfectly rational people, but behavioral economics will help us design a better world for the rest of us.

Irrationally yours,

Dan

Predictable Irrationality or Hidden Rationality?: Our First Author One-on-One

Now that we've started bringing authors onto Omni, we thought the next step would be to open the floor to two authors to talk directly to each other, without our getting in the way. (But feel free to get in the way yourself in the Comments section.) How often, for instance, would you like to see a book review, instead of serving as the final word, start a back and forth between the author and the reviewer (played out somewhere less infantile than the Letters to the Editor sandbox)? Or see debut authors trade notes about what it's like to have your first book published? We're hardly the first people to think of this sort of thing (Slate has done it well for years, although not as often as they used to), but it's new to us, so we're excited.

And we're excited about our first pairing, which was so glaringly obvious and potentially fascinating that it forced us into action. One of the liveliest and most popular new subgenres in publishing (along with Vampire Romance and Brett Favre Tributes) is Popular Economics, bustling with witty contrarian analyses of the ways the dismal science can illuminate our everyday lives, all coming in the wake of the blockbuster Freaknomics. But not all Pop Econ books are alike. In fact, on the surface, it looks like the two most popular new books in the genre this year, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, have a pretty basic disagreement. Ariely, says his book jacket, "refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways," while Harford's book jacket replies, "Under the surface of everyday insanity, life is logical after all." So, underneath it all, are we irrational or rational? (Or is one man's irrationality another's rationality?)

That's a fine disagreement to begin with, but from reading both books, you can tell the sides would not remain so simply divided (despite the doctored fight photo above that Ariely sent in when we proposed the idea--Ariely's in the red trunks and Harford's in the green, white and red). In part, this is a piece of a larger debate between traditional rationalist economics (Harford is an economics columnist for the Financial Times and Slate and the author of the bestselling Undercover Economist) and the newer field of behavioral economics (Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT), but more than that, it will be, I hope, a conversation between two smart and funny guys with a rare talent for connecting complex ideas to our daily lives.

The conversation actually began in February, when Harford wrote a largely positive review of Predictably Irrational in the FT. Here's a quote:

I could scarcely imagine a better introduction to “behavioural economics”, a discipline of growing influence that sits on the boundary between economics and psychology. But opinions differ among economists as to whether behavioural economics seriously challenges the long-held basic assumption of economics that we make rational choices, or whether it merely illuminates some fascinating but relatively minor human foibles.

Ariely continues things here on Omni with his first post today. Harford will follow later in the week, and for the next few weeks we'll keep roughly to a Monday/Thursday schedule. Please add your own comments to the discussion in the meantime, and thanks for joining us. --Tom

P.S. You'll notice Dan Ariely's photo a couple places on our page: our interview with him is also featured in the current episode of our Amazon Wire podcast (you can play the podcast in the right column of the blog while it's the current episode, or find it in the archives).

Are You Infected? A Comprehensive Interview with Author Scott Sigler

Scott Sigler, author of Infected, released today by Crown, is known by some as the world's most successful podcaster, with more than 30,000 fanatically devoted subscribers per book. He's also been profiled in The New York Times, among others. Sigler's background is as a reporter, marketer, and project manager, although he was "writing the whole time." Infected is pulse-pounding suspense fiction with horror and SF elements, involving radical personality shifts and parasites. The novel has already received NPR coverage and an enthusiastic endorsement in Entertainment Weekly. When I asked Sigler if the book had a soundtrack, since he seems to bring a very punk feel to his fiction, he told me: "It runs from metalcore to Frank Sinatra to the blues to AC/DC and The Donnas. Killswitch Engage can pop up next to the Bee Gees then Evanescence. Lately I'm really into American melodic metal influenced by the 'Sweeds' (Killswitch Engage, Trivium, Bullet for my Valentine, etc.). I interviewed Sigler via email recently to give Amazon readers more of a sense of both him and his writing--including his insights about podcasting, parasites, fans, and secret fears...

Amazon.com: Let's pretend for a second no one knows who you are. How did you get started doing podcasts, and was it always fiction you were podcasting?
Scott Sigler: I started podcasting fiction in March, 2005, with my first novel Earthcore. The book was originally going to be published by AOL/TimeWarner in May 2002, but they shut down the imprint the book was on, and I was back on the slush pile. It took my agent a few years to get the rights back, and by the time we did, we'd lost interest and momentum. I'd had enough. When I discovered podcasting, I went looking for fiction novels, as it seemed like a great way to revive the weekly serialized fiction of 50s radio--but I couldn't find anything of the kind. No one was podcasting fiction at the time. Once I realized I could be among the first, I figured out how to record, edit, make an RSS feed and scrambled to get an episode up.

Amazon.com: Do you find that writing fiction for podcasts is any different than writing fiction with the idea of a "book" in mind? And did this come into play during the editing process with your editor at Crown?
Scott Sigler: Fiction writing and podcasting fiction is the same for me, because I write a manuscript first, then podcast. I write, edit, re-write, re-write some more, then when the book is finished I podcast it. So the process is the same, but I get some great feedback from the Junkies and that lets me tweak the story in ways that will appeal to the fans. It's like market-testing your fiction. The changes are usually subtle, but significant. I find out what characters they like, or when they do NOT like my main character, plot holes, factual errors and more. I consider this a job, and my employer is my listening audience. I work hard to make stories that entertain them, so if they can point out problems I'm always listening to whatever they have to say. This makes the final print version much, much stronger. The Crown editor (Julian Pavia) brings another level of analysis to the story. He rocks the house. Between Julian and 30,000 avid listeners making suggestions, the story is forged into something cohesive and logical with a big payout at the end.

The One-day-ness of History: Questions for Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker is one of those writers I'll always pay attention to: in a modest way he seemingly reinvents writing for each new assignment, never content to use an old form to say what he wants. His first books created a new fiction subgenre--I'm not sure if it's ever been given a name, but let's call it the micronovel--in which he expands a tiny, ordinary moment, an office worker ascending an escalator in The Mezzanine, a father feeding his baby girl in Room Temperature, into a vastly curious commentary on an entire life. My favorite of his books, U and I, about his semi-obsession with John Updike, is a brilliantly honest and idiosyncratic examination of literary ambition and, more broadly, what it's like to be a fan of someone you don't know. Recently, he detoured for a few years into a new and intense career as a professional archivist--recounted in the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Double Fold--when he discovered how many rare copies of newspapers were being destroyed as libraries shifted to microfilm. And he also wrote my all-time favorite book review, a gloriously scatalogical celebration of the first volume of the (lamentably still uncompleted!) Historical Dictionary of American Slang (unavailable on the New York Review of Books site, but available, in the August 11, 1994, issue in your local library, one hopes).

So when I saw that his newest book, Human Smoke, was a history of World War II, I perked up for yet another reinvention, of both himself and of history-writing. And I wasn't disappointed, for it's not like any other book I've read. Rather than telling the complete narrative history of the runup to the war, or even, as you might expect from his earlier books, of his own investigation of that history, he tells his story in very short, matter-of-fact anecdotes. His own presence, front and center in his other books, is muted here, but still you feel its strong effect, for he has selected his anecdotes to construct an argument of sorts: that pacifists who resisted the war were, as he puts it in a short author's note, "right," and the war-loving Churchill was "wrong." As you can tell from recent Old Media Mondays, the reaction to the book has been very mixed: either "one of the most important books you will ever read" or "not just a stupid book, but a scary one." My own reaction, as I say below, was in between. To say we shouldn't have fought World War II, or at least not the way we did, is a counterfactual of such strength that I'll need more than a selection of anecdotes, without further argument, to convince me. But it's a story worth reading. Nonviolence is a potent but exacting ideal that's hard to sustain in the face of human cruelty--one indication being that Martin Luther King's former right-hand man Clarence Jones is about to publish a book, What Would Martin Say?, arguing, of all things, that King would have supported the Iraq War--but is always worth testing yourself against.

There are few recent books that left me more eager to ask questions of its author, so I was very pleased that Nicholson Baker was able to take the time to reply. And for those looking for (much) further discussion of the book, I second his recommendation of the extensive roundtable discussion of the book at Edrants.

Amazon.com: This is obviously a big departure for you, in both style and subject.  How did the project come about, and how did it find this form?

Baker: I was writing a different book, on a smaller historical subject, when I stopped and asked: Do I understand World War Two?  And of course I didn't.  Also I'd been reading newspapers from the thirties and forties, and I knew that there were startling things in them.

In earlier books, I've looked closely at moments to see why they matter, and I've tried to rescue things, people, ideas from overfamiliarity.  So in a way a book like this--which moves a loupe over some incidents along the way to a much-chronicled war--was a natural topic. 

But yes, the style is a departure: it's very simple here out of respect for the hellishness of the story that I'm trying to assemble, piece by piece. 

How Not to Write x 27

I'm a bit late in coming to it (via the Virginia Quarterly Review blog), but the editors of the Willesden Herald, having reaped a balance of fame and scorn for deciding, via the person of their final judge Zadie Smith, not to award their short story prize this year because none of the 850 entrants were good enough, have responded with a list of 27 reasons why your story might have been eliminated. Their tough-love approach may win them no more affection, but the results are interesting reading and would no doubt make a worthwhile checklist for anyone (myself included) lost down the wormhole of their own unread art. They got a little punchy towards the end, where you'll find some of my favorite entries:

23. Faux jollity. Particularly faux jollity centred around pubs, and particularly around pubs in Ireland. Industrially extruded quantities of guff about distant histories in small town life. Standing jokes that should have been left where they toppled. Weird spastic prose as if the task of writing the story had been given by a writer with a good idea to the former class dunce, now barman. I think humour only ever exists in something that sets out to be serious. Anything that sets out to be humorous is doomed.

24. Ankles. Particularly ankles in Asia. But I don't want to be overly negative and turn critique into a despicable blood sport, because there have been many charming, fascinating and amusing entries from the sub-continent as well as from Africa and other (to me) strange places. As a matter of fact, I’m not at all sure that Ankles in Asia, though it sounds worryingly now like a rare disease, is not in fact a virtue. Let a thousand professors dream of butterfly kisses with a thousand feisty young neighbour girls. And please do try us again with wonderful tales of African village life and politics.

27. Pastiche. There can be cases where the whole story is a cliché, if you see what I mean, which is usually to say that it is derivative in the extreme. If it's not a simple case of writing to a formula, this is more seriously a lack of a genuine "voice". What I usually say about pastiche is that I'm very impressed by people who can emulate other writers to a tee, because I find it difficult enough just to write like myself. Here's a little story: When I was a kid I used to sing myself to sleep at night. One Sunday I went to see The Jolson Story (I think I saw parts 1 and 2) at the Casino cinema in Finglas and memorised some of the songs. That night I began to sing them in bed, and trying to sound like Al Jolson. Lying back in the dark, after a while I asked my Grandad, who slept on the other side of the room, if he liked my new voice. I'll always remember his answer because it said so much. He said, "I prefer your own voice."

See also their extensive summary of the judging process and Zadie Smith's original announcement of the non-winner (all of which I find very appealing). --Tom

Apocalypse Redux: The World of Justin Taylor

    
(The Apocalypse Reader cover and Justin Taylor in his "bomb shelter".)

Last week I blogged about Wastelands, an anthology of contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. This time, because Monday is all about post-weekend devastation, we here at Omnivoracious bring you some historical, and sometimes hysterical, perspective to the subject via the multi-talented Justin Taylor. His The Apocalypse Reader, published last year by Thunder's Mouth Press and featured on National Public Radio, is the perfect companion volume to Wastelands. It contains a rich mix of stories from a wide variety of time periods, from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne to Kelly Link, Michael Moorcock, Tao Lin, Steve Aylett, and Ursula K. Le Guin. The range of tone is quite remarkable. Taylor, who recently edited a second anthology (Come Back, Donald Barthelme, published as part of McSweeney's 24) has done a great job of including everything from black humor to extremely serious and unsettling views of the way the world ends. I recently interviewed Taylor via email, to find out just how serious he is about this whole apocalypse thing...

Amazon.com: For the edification of our readers, can you describe where you are right now, while you're answering these questions? Are you in a bunker or other shelter, for example?
Justin Taylor: I'm writing to you from my special bunker, which is craftily disguised as a bedroom with good natural light on the 3rd floor of a small apartment building with bad pipes. It's all really high-tech next-gen kind of stuff. In the event of Apocalypse, my bedroom will float here in space while the rest of the building and/or world crumbles around it. Oh and the pipes stay connected too, so I'll be floating in space but still able to use the bathroom and shower and stuff, though nobody really knows if I'll be able to get hot water or for how long, though that won't be much of a change from how the water situation is now. Of course the exact location is confidential, but I can tell you it's in Brooklyn.

Amazon.com: