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

Amazon Exclusive: A Review of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s El Juego del Ángel (Angel's Game)

      
   (The cover of the Spanish edition and the author.)

This week marks the official release of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's El Juego del Ángel in the United States. It's a follow-up to his international bestseller The Shadow of the Wind. As Amazon reported back in March, the novel had the highest initial printing for any novel published in Spain.

The catch? For now, it's only available in the author's native tongue, Spanish. With an English-language version just barely on the horizon, we turned to Larry Nolen to write a review based on his reading of an advance copy of the Spanish edition. Nolen divides his time between being an English and History teacher, engaging in amateur translations of Latin American authors, and operating a blog devoted to literature--a blog that was one of the first to provide any information about El Juego del Ángel in either language in the months leading up to its publication. Nolen, with both the review and the translation of two paragraphs from the novel, give us limited creatures who don't read Spanish a tantalizing glimpse of the rich treasures to come. Visit Nolen's blog for English translations of two recent interviews with the author.

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

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

Pop Culture Report #3: James and Kathryn Morrow's European SF Anthology

Earlier this month, Tor Books released the trade paperback edition of James and Kathryn Morrow's The SFWA European Hall of Fame, a collection of sixteen stories translated from a variety of European countries. Contributors include Jean-Claude Dunyach, Panagiotis Koustas, Joao Barreiros, Andreas Eschbach, and many more. Most of these writers are well-known in their own countries but have had very little work translated into English. Our Pop Culture Report #3 (above) gives you more information on this intriguing, some would say essential, anthology. I conducted the interviews with the editors and Greek contributor Koustas in Nantes, France, last year, at Utopiales, a wonderful speculative fiction festival.

From Publishers Weekly's starred review: Wondrous worlds await U.S. SF fans in this sensitively chosen, impeccably translated anthology of Continental European science fiction stories, ranging from 1987 to 2005. Offering "emotional satisfaction and cerebral excitement," as James Morrow puts it in his introduction, highlights include Johanna Sinisalo's "Baby Doll," a Finnish denunciation of materialistic exploitation of children; Romanian Lucian Merisca's "Some Earthlings' Adventures on Outrerria," an excruciating political satire; Valerio Angelisti's "Sepultura," which offers a neo-Dantean Infernoscape; and W.J. Maryson's "Verstummte Musik," a Dutch near-future Orwellian nightmare. A French twist on human-machine interface lifts Jean-Claude Dunyach's "Separations" into a meditation on the nature of artistic creativity, while Elena Arsenieva's "A Birch Tree, a White Fox" exquisitely illustrates the quintessential Russian soul. These "disciplined speculations" by European writers and their painstaking translators not only excite the mind, they move the heart.

Book-Beer Pairings (Part II)--T.C. Boyle, Chip Kidd, Margo Lanagan, James Morrow, and More

     
(Large beer Drayman's Porter with Small Beer's Ant King; Dudman's novel and Old Speckled Hen.)

Much has happened since posting Part I of the book-beer pairings feature. First, I tested out Three Philosophers with Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton and found that (1) it is indeed a great Belgian-style beer, with some very subtle yet strong flavors, and (2) it goes very well with Groff's book.

Then, I decided to check in with Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press because...well, how can you do this kind of feature and not talk to a publisher called Small Beer Press? Gavin has a lot of respect for both books and beer--and access to both locally. “We have a fantastic brewery (ok, we have a few) in the Happy Valley in Massachusetts: the Berkshire Brewing Company. Their Traditional Pale Ale is a summer time treat and all winter we survive on their Drayman's Porter. Which is what we were drinking when the UPS guy delivered galleys of our next collection, Ben Rosenbaum's The Ant King.” (You can now download John Kessel’s excellent new collection The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Maureen F. McHugh's powerful Mothers & Other Monsters from the Small Beer website.)

So, without further rabbiting, the continuation of this landmark feature...

Guinness Versus Everything Else?!

Although most participants in the second half of this feature preferred matching a dark beer with their books, a few hold-outs for lighter imbibification include Thomas Disch, Nick Mamatas, and Chip Kidd—Kidd mostly because, as a purist, he deferred to his novel: “In The Learners, Happy and Himillsy down Rolling Rocks at Modern Apizz in New Haven, so that would appropriate. Otherwise, everyone drinks martinis.”

Mamatas probably wouldn’t typify his pick as a light beer, although it is: “The official beer of Weinbergia, the country in Under My Roof, is Red Stripe.  Short and hip, sweet and a bit more dangerous than you might at first suspect.  Plus, hipsters dig it like they dig uncombed hair and T-shirts from 1985.”

Similarly, Disch, author of the forthcoming The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten (coming July 1 from Tachyon Publications), selected either Rhinegold or Lowenbrau for his forthcoming farcical “memoir”: “In the New York of my youth (I was 17 when I got here in '57, and Miss Rhinegold was then an annual tradition. The contestants had their pictures posted in the subways. There was also a Miss Subways. They have both disappeared in our new, unsexed era, but there is another good reason to serve Rhinegold at the book party. It is the beer Wagner made famous. Not much of a beer in itself, as I recall, which is why it may have become extinct, and not the best opera in the Ring either, but no one has ever dared to bring out a beer called Gotterdammerung....I was actually in Lowenbrau Hofbrauhaus in Munich (in 1966). There were tiers of drinking halls where roisterers bellowed out drinking songs. A kind of Valhalla.”

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.]

Book-Beer Pairings (Part I): Arianna Huffington, Michael Chabon, Lauren Groff, and More

(Lauren Groff's Monsters paired with Brewery Ommegang's Three Philosophers, along with another great Ommegang beer, and an interloping stout.)

For a long time, I’ve wondered why wine and food should have all the fun. Here at Omnivoracious, we also believe in the complementary pairing of books with...beer. Now, please note that we’re not advocating irresponsible reading, but with the current popularity of micro-breweries and the role of beer in the writing of books over the centuries, it seems somehow irresponsible not to pair the two. We’re frankly a little surprised no one’s done it before.

Thus, I took it upon myself to explore the connection between hops and writing chops, going far afield to ask a diverse group of writers what beer or beers would go best with their latest work. The results were so revelatory and comprehensive that we’re running the first half of this feature today and the second half on Thursday...

Light Beers, Lambics, Arrogant Bastard, and More!

Naturally, everyone approached the question in a slightly different way. Eastern European surrealist Zoran Zivkovic appeared to have already sampled a brew or three, sending in the rhyming verse, “Drink Bud West, drink Bud East,/Drink Bud reading Steps through the Mist.” Elizabeth Hand echoed Zivkovic, even while confessing she hasn’t drunk beer in thirty years: “But the last time I did have one, it was almost certainly a glass of Bud with a shot-glass of Jack Daniels in it. A boilermaker, which is what Cass Neary in [the dark thriller] Generation Loss would drink--24/7, and minus the beer.”

Arianna Huffington, author of the just-released Right Is Wrong, decided on a more political (and surprisingly conservative) approach, writing, “Busch, of course!  Besides the homonymic convergence, distribution of this beer helped make Cindy McCain rich and funded John McCain’s political career.”

Other books that apparently take a lighter approach include Karen Joy Fowler’s Wit’s End, paired with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale: “The company describes it as a new take on a classic theme; it's light, but complex.  This is a North Californian company, which fits me and my book.  But what I like best is the slogan--‘the beer that made Chico famous.’ The where?”

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).

Junot Diaz, You've Just Won the Pulitzer... What Are You Going to Do Now?

Last summer, after turning over the last page of my advance galley of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was floored by what I had just read and used any gathering of two or more people to announce to the world that it was my favorite novel of 2007. "You mean, so far?" No, the year. I was going all-in, even with a whole fall season of unread books in front of me.

So you can imagine how over-the-moon happy I was for Diaz last Monday when I heard that he'd won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When I asked his editor, Sean McDonald, if he could help us get a few post-Pulitzer questions into Junot's inbox, I didn't expect Diaz would actually have the time to deliver (he'd just won the Pulitzer, after all!). But deliver he did, and along with the answers, he threw us the ultimate surprise--the opening passage (or what he calls "throat clearing") from the seemingly post-apocalyptic new book he's working on. Does this mean there's a Hugo Award in his future? We shall see...

--BTP

Amazon.com: Junot, first of all, congratulations! You've been on quite a ride since Oscar Wao came out last fall. You were awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, topped countless Best of 2007 lists, and now the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Where were you when you found out you won the Pulitzer?

Diaz: I actually was in my mother's house in NJ. (Which, when you think about it, was where it all started for me, as an immigrant, as a young lover of books, in NJ.) The first call I could barely hear (my two-year-old nephew was having a bang-up time throwing his toys) so I went outside, out by the Hackensack River and called my agent, who hadn't yet gotten the official word. The real confirmation came ten minutes later. I was still on the bridge, freezing, and after a few minutes of stunned silence, just me and the traffic and the cattails, I walked home and gathered my mother and my sister and told them and I don't think I've ever seen them happier for me (though my mother did cry a little). My nephew was the best, he didn't give a damn about no Pulitzer, he just wanted me to chase him.

Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?

Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.

Amazon.com: And what's it like to share the Pulitzer spotlight with Bob Dylan, who was awarded an honorary special citation?

Diaz: I'm one book, he's a lifetime. It feels great to be in such company. Now if somebody could score my goddaughters some tickets, I'll be the coolest godfather ever.

Amazon.com: Do all the awards make the over-a-decade gap between books worth the wait?

Diaz: The only thing that makes anything worth it is another book that moves people. But hey, in the meantime, the awards certainly keep you warm, psychically! No denying that.

Amazon.com: Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2017 until the next book?

Diaz: If I was the only writer in the world this would be a problem but luckily we have tens of thousands of cool writers to take the weight off. No matter who you're waiting for to publish I recommend a strong course of Samuel R. Delany (start with Dark Reflections and then graduate to his magnum opus Dhalgren) and my favorite crazy woman Natsuo Kirino (Grotesque). Always something on the shelves to keep you busy.

Amazon.com: Can you give us a little tease of what you're working on next?

Diaz: Oh sure, why not, who knows when it will ever see the light of day again. This is some opening throat-clearing from my next novel Dark America.

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck.  Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora.  See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League--a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we're in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I'm not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road. She has her hand on his shoulder and they still got snow clotting up the spaces between their toes. They're waving. Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I don't try to look around too much. We are going over a hundred miles an hour and there is a little indio kid on my left who I'm trying to keep from blowing off the top of the transport. About an hour ago his pops lost his grip on him and screamed one of those miserable Noooo's that reaches into even me and before the kid could catch sky I leaned over and pulled him in. You should have heard his little heart, seen his little face. Stupid, attracting attention. A Samaritan I'm not. Believe me. I could just as easily have watched the kid sail and said, Wepa!

At times like these, even hardguys like me, all we should do is hold on. Plenty folks get peeled off the transports, especially kids and the thins, turned into axle grease which is why these rigs are plastered with signs in English, Spanish, Krïol, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Ghanaian: Stay The F-ck Off. Sometimes the local youth--when they're not immbolized on huff or bending each other over--will man the overpasses and drop debris on us, anything from bricks and firecrackers to hot oil and glass, get it all on ractives so they can spin the shit for laughs onto the net. The life of the Traveller, as they say, no es fácil. You should see how tired folks are after only a couple of hours on a transport. Praying for the next reforge, their arms trembling and these are the ones who got lucky and scored a roof spot. The ones who got to cling to the side rigging, muchacho, they're lucky if they're alive by the time we reach a depot.

Win a Weekend with J.K. Rowling's "The Tales of Beedle the Bard"

Calling all Harry Potter fans!
Want to get your (gloved) hands on J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard? Amazon.com wants to send you and a friend to London, England to spend a weekend with the rare and delightful book of fairy tales (security guards included, of course), handwritten and illustrated by J.K. Rowling herself. Open to muggles ages 13 and older in 24 countries, the Beedle the Bard Ballad Writing Contest challenges you to creatively answer one of the following three questions in 100 words or less:

• What songs do wizards use to celebrate birthdays?
• What sports do wizards play besides Quidditch?
• What have you learned from the Harry Potter series that you use in everyday life?

An Amazon.com committee will select 10 semi-finalist submissions (based on creativity and writing style) from each of two age categories: 13-17 and 18-and-over. Amazon.com customers will determine the two finalists and Grand Prize winner by voting for their favorites. But hurry--submissions will be accepted through 11:59 p.m. PDT April 22, 2008. 

If you haven’t already, take a look at The Tales of Beedle the Bard: