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Gary L. Reback, Free the Market! Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive: This isn’t the most engaging general-interest book on why you should care about antitrust law; that honor belongs to Kurt Eichenwald’s The Informant, which is essentially a true crime yarn focused on price-fixing in agricultural chemicals by Archer Daniels Midland. Eichenwald begins with a wonderful look at exactly why price-fixing is bad for other people, getting you to identify with the farmers hurt by anticompetitive practices. That said, Reback’s is a more comprehensive book than The Informant, focused on the high tech sector but giving an impassioned defense of the need for competition to protect consumers and spur innovation, along with an overview of current economic thinking about when markets can regulate themselves and when they are vulnerable to abuse by dominant market players to the detriment of others. Reback has defended companies against antitrust claims and also used the antitrust laws to challenge his clients’ competitors; he’s not exactly balanced, but he does end up with a pretty good story for why the government needs to do more before the market congeals around a standard. He hates patents because they promote monopoly, making nice connections between intellectual property and the overall competitive environment. His vitriol at the collapse of antitrust enforcement is engaging, and it’s really depressing when he points out that consolidation in the market has forced Americans to pay tons more for high-speed internet than citizens of other high-income countries, who by the way get faster service than we do. As with the overall financial crisis, the ultimate message is that you can regulate the market early, or you can try to fix it once it’s obviously broken, and the latter solution ends up with more government intervention overall.
Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, eds. Phil Powrie & Robynn Stilwell: Aside from the essays I found useful for thinking about vidding, there was a neat piece by Raymond Knapp about music in Frankenstein movies, including Young Frankenstein, which discussed the relationship between music and electricity and made the point that Shelley’s Frankenstein did not use electricity to raise his monster; that conceit is modern and visual. Robynn Stilwell also had a fun chapter about the use of music, specifically vinyl records, in coming-of-age stories for girls, and how the girl collector/boy collector divide plays out in various ways (for example, does the collector listen to the music?). “Male”-type collecting prioritizes the exertion of control over the outside world, whereas “female”-type collecting emphasizes the definition of self through connection to objects that reflect the collector’s subjectivity. Stilwell discusses female record collectors “one of whom feels her collection reveals who she is (as a whole), and another who considers her collection a diary, or self-portrait, and could not bear to part with any of the CDs because they contain ‘too many memories.’”
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: Typically engaging, and generalizing-from-a-few-examples, fare from Gladwell, who argues that success is the result not of individual characteristics, as we usually insist, but actually surrounding circumstance: fortunate opportunity, in time and place and resources. Being born just after the cutoff birthdate for various sports leagues that start kids really young, for example, is essentially the only way to succeed in those leagues, because it means you’re bigger and more developed than the other kids in your group, and so you get more playing time and coaching attention, increasing the disparity; those advantages, if conferred early enough, simply can’t be made up for later when birthdate is less important. He also argues that culture is critical, discussing airplane accidents and the ways in which various culturally inflected styles of communication can work or fail when people are tired, distracted, or otherwise unlikely to process the subtleties of deferential or indirect speech. Both are ways of highlighting the importance of context as opposed to the idea that achievement and failure can be attributed to unique individual competences or deficiencies. A more detailed and critical review from rachelmanija.
Tal Ben-Shahar, The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life: A self-help book! I think I would have liked Happier better; this book is directed at giving readers strategies to guide themselves in the direction of “optimalism” rather than perfectionism, accepting disappointment and long, hard roads to success. I was really struck by the ways in which the advice was removed from social context and individualized: other people showed up, basically, as potential sources of desired goods like love, but it was all about changing yourself. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the baseline for a self-help book was a highly independent self with a lot of social capital, such that success (or failure) at standard material/social goals was possible, but it was just so unlike what I usually read. Ben-Shahar argues that human nature is fixed (though he gives very little content to that fixity in this book, except to say that communism must fail and capitalism must succeed; he quotes Ayn Rand as a good guide to love!) but human behavior isn’t, and once he made that move, with no attempt to discuss power and how things get slotted into nature v. behavior and by whom, I kind of stopped paying attention. On the other hand, I did find earlier parts of the book useful: he makes a good case that modern Western culture too readily encourages people to suppress bad feelings instead of acknowledging them, which makes it harder to experience good feelings in the long run.
Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive: Cialdini’s Influence is a fantastic book on the psychology of persuasion and how advertisers use it. Yes! is a quick read designed to give little bite-size chunks of that work, absent much of the research/citation. It’s diverting enough, but I really recommend Influence in its place, and that book ought to be cheaper used!
Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film, eds. Phil Powrie & Robynn Stilwell: Aside from the essays I found useful for thinking about vidding, there was a neat piece by Raymond Knapp about music in Frankenstein movies, including Young Frankenstein, which discussed the relationship between music and electricity and made the point that Shelley’s Frankenstein did not use electricity to raise his monster; that conceit is modern and visual. Robynn Stilwell also had a fun chapter about the use of music, specifically vinyl records, in coming-of-age stories for girls, and how the girl collector/boy collector divide plays out in various ways (for example, does the collector listen to the music?). “Male”-type collecting prioritizes the exertion of control over the outside world, whereas “female”-type collecting emphasizes the definition of self through connection to objects that reflect the collector’s subjectivity. Stilwell discusses female record collectors “one of whom feels her collection reveals who she is (as a whole), and another who considers her collection a diary, or self-portrait, and could not bear to part with any of the CDs because they contain ‘too many memories.’”
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: Typically engaging, and generalizing-from-a-few-examples, fare from Gladwell, who argues that success is the result not of individual characteristics, as we usually insist, but actually surrounding circumstance: fortunate opportunity, in time and place and resources. Being born just after the cutoff birthdate for various sports leagues that start kids really young, for example, is essentially the only way to succeed in those leagues, because it means you’re bigger and more developed than the other kids in your group, and so you get more playing time and coaching attention, increasing the disparity; those advantages, if conferred early enough, simply can’t be made up for later when birthdate is less important. He also argues that culture is critical, discussing airplane accidents and the ways in which various culturally inflected styles of communication can work or fail when people are tired, distracted, or otherwise unlikely to process the subtleties of deferential or indirect speech. Both are ways of highlighting the importance of context as opposed to the idea that achievement and failure can be attributed to unique individual competences or deficiencies. A more detailed and critical review from rachelmanija.
Tal Ben-Shahar, The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life: A self-help book! I think I would have liked Happier better; this book is directed at giving readers strategies to guide themselves in the direction of “optimalism” rather than perfectionism, accepting disappointment and long, hard roads to success. I was really struck by the ways in which the advice was removed from social context and individualized: other people showed up, basically, as potential sources of desired goods like love, but it was all about changing yourself. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the baseline for a self-help book was a highly independent self with a lot of social capital, such that success (or failure) at standard material/social goals was possible, but it was just so unlike what I usually read. Ben-Shahar argues that human nature is fixed (though he gives very little content to that fixity in this book, except to say that communism must fail and capitalism must succeed; he quotes Ayn Rand as a good guide to love!) but human behavior isn’t, and once he made that move, with no attempt to discuss power and how things get slotted into nature v. behavior and by whom, I kind of stopped paying attention. On the other hand, I did find earlier parts of the book useful: he makes a good case that modern Western culture too readily encourages people to suppress bad feelings instead of acknowledging them, which makes it harder to experience good feelings in the long run.
Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, and Robert B. Cialdini, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive: Cialdini’s Influence is a fantastic book on the psychology of persuasion and how advertisers use it. Yes! is a quick read designed to give little bite-size chunks of that work, absent much of the research/citation. It’s diverting enough, but I really recommend Influence in its place, and that book ought to be cheaper used!