Whimsley

Reader, you're a right dimwit

Bookslut points to an article in The Times by Libby Purves on how bookstores (in the UK) have publishers caught in a prisoner's dilemma when it comes to promoting books, and as a result readers are stuck in a market for lemons. Here is an excerpt:

Reports have “revealed” the so-called secret fees paid by publishers to booksellers in order to get books stocked, “chosen” and recommended by the big book chains.

That W H Smith’s “book of the week” title, which attracts you as if it had won a prize, has been bought and paid for. The publisher handed over £50,000. Waterstone’s Book of the Week accolade is £10,000, less for ecstatic mini-reviews. Borders charges for “fiction buyer’s favourite”. Smaller sums buy other levels of prominence; only some local staff “picks” are related to actual content. It is not uncommon for a catalogue to recommend a title warmly before the compiler has even seen it. A pre-Christmas push costs £200,000 and a big campaign double that. One publisher told a newspaper: “We’ve got to play by the rules because we need them.” It is considered suicidal not to join in.

...Seventy per cent of promotional budgets go on furtive payments to bookshops. The message to the author is: “Nobody would read you if we didn’t pay, so shut up grumbling.” To the reader the message is: “You are a fool pig, guaranteed to go for the shiniest swill-bucket.” To the newspapers who publish bestseller charts it is simply: “Gotcha!”

Most of these charts cover sales in one particular week, so they favour the fast-selling and heavily displayed. They are no index of pleasure or even real popularity. It is not uncommon for a book to reach high rank one week and live off that glory (“surprise soaraway bestseller for tragic Gwendolen”) when in fact it has shifted fewer hardbacks than another book that never got near the top 20 because it sold more gradually.

Well, so be it. Bookselling is a trade; it is sad but not criminal that it operates like one, cutting deals to maximise profit. It is sad but not surprising that big booksellers do not care that their practices are widening the gulf between hyped authors and the rest, squeezing out new writers and truncating the careers of those who fail to return the publisher’s investment fast enough. They do not care that the literary double-or-quits economy prevents the slower, organic growth of writing careers.

The responsibility spreads wider, though. You would think that, knowing how skewed the trade has become, book page editors would question the status quo as journalists do in every other area. You would think that their mission was to seek out interesting new books while scornfully ignoring hype-fests. There is little evidence of this, except in some odd and praiseworthy corners. Journalists like to feel they are up there with the “buzz”, even if the buzz is largely artificial. Where reviews do diverge from the well-trodden track of the week’s “key” books, it is often only into a cosy circuit of settling old scores, or bigging up friends who will soon return the favour. This is often undeclared, which shocks the strait-laced American media (read the New York Times arts ethical policy online, boys, and hang your heads).

Newspapers and magazines are also magpies, attracted to the glitter of the young, the pretty, the well-connected, the celebrity. If Keira Knightley publishes a novel tomorrow it will not go short of attention, while if a new Orwell or Greene emerges from the ranks he may fall back unnoticed. There are some flukes, but even notable “word of mouth” successes often turn out to be no such thing. And the moment an unhyped book starts to move, the big chains will be on to the publisher with display offers they dare not refuse. All success becomes a commodity.

This fits with what I've seen, and with my argument in Chapter 9. Other reports (which I can't find now) suggest that compared to ten years ago, more books are published now than used to be, and more titles are carried (in some form or other) by bookstores. But the total volume of books sold is about the same as it used to be, and of that amount more goes to just a few bestsellers. It's what happens in a market when you don't know what you're buying. Book buying is going, apparently, from being a high-information market to a low-information market.

On the down side, it's kind of a depressing view of the book industry. On the up side, it's a great excuse if No One Makes You doesn't do that well.

Libby Purves, by the way, wrote my favourite parenting book, How Not To Be a Perfect Mother.

Great Throbbing Caterpillars

I was out in the front yard just now, trimming some miniature pine trees we have (to keep them miniature) when, all of a sudden, one of the branches moved.

Then it moved again.

What had looked like a slightly darker area of the tree was, in fact, a mass of caterpillars. And yes, they were throbbing, rhythmically.

You want proof? I've got proof. Here. Look at this. I put a video up on You Tube (my first posting there).

Watch the Caterpillars

Each caterpillar is about 2 cm (3/4 in) long. I've no idea what they are or whether I should be killing them. They've been doing the synchronized throbbing thing for about an hour at least now.

Two questions:

Q1 - Will use of the phrase "throbbing caterpillars" lead to a spike in traffic to this site?
Q2 - Is Great Throbbing Caterpillars a great name for a band. A. Yes.

Revenge of the elephant racers

From today's Sunday Star, how trucks slow everyone down but actually speed up  traffice through bottlenecks. It sounds fine in principle -- like making sure everyone walks when there is a fire alarm clears a building quicker, the key thing is to keep traffic smooth, not to permit high speeds. Does it happen in practice? I don't do enough highway driving to know.

Link: TheStar.com - Revenge of the elephant racers.

Revenge of the elephant racers

Why truckers on the 401 team up to control traffic, and help everyone else in the process

May 28, 2006. 01:00 AM

ANDREW CHUNG

TORONTO STAR

Has the thought ever occurred to you on the rig-riddled Highway 401 that truck drivers were deliberately conspiring to prevent you, humming along in your sleek little Celica, from getting around them?

Some drivers thought so last weekend as they approached a bridge construction zone near Belleville, where the highway lanes narrowed from two to one. Giant tractor trailers seemed to line up side-by-side, blocking both lanes, and slow to a speed that left a half-kilometre gap between them and vehicles farther ahead, which were themselves following behind another set of trucks doing exactly the same thing.

Eventually, one truck let the other merge into the single lane, and everyone slipped past the construction without much fanfare. But it was slow moving. Some motorists became furious. A few honked their horns. Others, with teeth bared and nostrils flaring, took to the highway's gravel shoulder to bypass the lumbering mechanical beasts.

It might be easy to flip these truckers the bird and continue on your way, except that, as construction season begins, you should know that traffic experts, driving instructors and even the police say these trucks could be doing everyone a big favour.

Though technically not legal, their tactics over the Victoria Day weekend on the 401 ensured that vehicles passed through the construction zone faster and more smoothly than they otherwise would have.

By forcing all the vehicles leading into the merging lanes to a slower speed, they prevented the common stop and start "slinky" effect common to bottlenecks on any major roadway. This, experts say, makes traffic flow more efficiently.

"If you have a construction site, you have all this manoeuvring trying to get through, and that can slow things down. So what the truck is doing is smoothing that flow," says Eric Miller, a civil engineering professor at the University of Toronto and a specialist in transportation systems modelling.

At the site of a merge, you're going to find people jockeying for position, trying to get through. This can lead to traffic "turbulence."

"But," says Miller, "it's going on behind the truck, which doesn't affect the rate at which people are going through because they're sorted out by the time they get to the bottleneck."

Miller cautions this is simply a hypothesis, but it makes sense and should be studied mathematically.

"Flows of vehicles on the roadway are very similar to water flowing through a pipe or air flowing over an airplane wing," he says. Ideally, you want the flow to be smooth, or laminar, rather than turbulent.
Yvan Chartrand, president and founder of the 5th Wheel Training Institute, which has campuses in Warwick and New Liskeard, Ont., and graduates up to 700 new truck operators each year, said the technique is simple. He did it himself.

"They create a buffer zone in front of them so if the cars ahead do stop, the trucks don't stop. If they did it well, these truckers didn't stop. They kept going, and when it was time to shrink down to one lane of traffic, they went one behind the other and went past the construction, and then the cars were allowed to pass," Chartrand explains.

In the process, the truckers avoid a situation where, near a bottleneck, they would have to keep stopping and starting their trailers, which takes much longer and requires much more space than a car to do so.

As a driver, he says, "you don't take the time to think these things out, you'll think these trucks are holding you up. But if you were in a helicopter and saw how it all plays out, you would see that when it shrank to one lane, there was no waiting, no stopping; it was easier on the brakes, the clutch, fuel, and it saved energy and frustration."
Chartrand says students are not taught such tactics as part of the school's curriculum, but instructors pass on their experience when students ask questions.

Most truckers get paid by the kilometre, not the hour, so they need to get where they're going as quickly and efficiently as possible.

You might conclude, then, that the tactic is less an act of altruism than selfishness.

"I think it was probably a safe, but selfish act, to keep themselves moving, and not force themselves to do a dangerous manoeuvre," says Ed Popkie, the Institute's executive director.

Of course, car drivers are selfish, too. They typically don't let big rigs merge into their lanes, especially when they're rushing to get to the cottage on a long weekend.

So rather than find themselves in a situation where they might have to wait long periods for a sympathetic car driver, or get frustrated and possibly cut someone off, truckers sometimes "take control of the situation," Popkie says.

They'll use their CB radios to call a trucker near them and arrange themselves to safely and smoothly keep their wheels moving. "You might call out and say, `Okay, it's a go, we're going from two to one lane up here. Let's stick side by each. I'll let you in when we get to the end, and we'll make it through,'" Popkie says.

While it may end up helping everybody in a bottleneck, it's certainly not legal, police say.When truckers travel side-by-side clogging up both lanes of a highway, police call it an "elephant race" — because they're big and slow.

"That's an offence," says Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Cam Woolley, adding the OPP gets occasional complaints about the practice. "It's failing to keep right, or unnecessarily slow driving."

Truckers have used blocking in the past to protest high fuel prices, he says, or simply to be mischievous.

Woolley cautions that it's not up to truckers to control traffic. "If they wanted to maintain their own speed, to not stop and start, they should do that in the right-hand lane."

Chartrand pleads common sense. He says truckers' actions, like everyone else's, must be considered in context.

"Is the trucker's intent to slow the traffic up, or is it his intention to make sure everyone gets there better and faster?" he asks. "Even though technically it may not be legal, what's wrong with it?"

"It's possible," Woolley concedes, "if they were going as fast as they could without having to stop, it could have been a benefit to traffic, yes."

So the next time you find yourself in an elephant race, it may be useful to remember the story of the tortoise and the hare:

Slow and steady... slow and steady.

Why Europeans Work Less Than Americans

Steven Landsburg in Forbes Magazine misinterprets what a union is (or could be) -- seeing it as a source of coercive rules rather than as a mechanism for coordinating actions, but does have some interesting things to say about how many hours people work in different countries, and why there is a pressure to work a similar amount to everyone else.

Compared to Europeans, Americans are more likely to be employed and more likely to work longer hours--employed Americans put in about three hours more per week than employed Frenchmen. Most importantly, Americans take fewer (and shorter) vacations. The average American takes off less than six weeks a year; the average Frenchman almost twelve. The world champion vacationers are the Swedes, at 16 and a half weeks per year.

This raises more than one interesting question. First, why do Americans choose to work so much? (Or, if you prefer, why do Europeans choose to work so little?) Second, who's happier?

... One trio of economists (Ed Glaeser of Harvard, Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth and Jose Scheinkman of Princeton) offers this explanation: When your wages are cut 20%, you take more vacations. But when your friends' wages are also cut 20%, you'll take even  more vacations, because vacations are more fun when you've got friends to share them with. So a 20% across-the-board tax hike, which affects both you and your friends, yields a more dramatic response than a 20% cut in your own wages.

An overlapping trio (Glaeser, Sacerdote, and Harvard's Albert Alesina) give some credence to this "social multiplier" theory...but claim to have identified the primary culprit in European labor regulations. While 20% of American workers are unionized, more than 80% of workers are unionized in France and Sweden. And while American unions have spent the past few decades fighting for higher wages, European unions have fought for shorter hours.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? According to traditional economic theory, workers are best off when they can decide for themselves how much to work. Some workers might choose long hours and big paychecks; others might choose less income and long vacations.

Union-inspired regulations, by restricting individual choice, can only make those workers worse off. But here's what traditional theory overlooks: If you live in Europe, then union regulations not only force you to work less; they also force your  friends to work less--which can be a blessing if you're trying to coordinate a camping trip.

So at least in principle, coercive union rules could be good for everyone. So, for that matter, could high marginal tax rates, and for exactly the same reason: The more your friends are taxed, the easier it is to coax them into taking time off to share your vacation time.

...If European and American paths continue to diverge, we'll soon learn a lot more about whether well-rested Frenchmen are happier than wealthy Americans.

Steven Landsburg is an economics professor at the University of Rochester and the author of The Armchair Economist  and Fair Play.

(Link: Why Europeans Work Less Than Americans - Forbes.com.

Blood and Money

Stumbling and Mumbling often points me to things I didn't know. A few days ago he pointed to this:

if you treat everyone as if they were motivated by money alone, you might drive out these higher motives and worsen management-labour relations. There's some evidence that this happens in blood donations; if you pay people to give blood, some stop giving.

And links to a paper by some Kiwi researchers that shows it can happen. People donate blood for a variety of reasons, but part of it is because we want to be the kind of person who does their civic duty. If you pay people to donate blood, they no longer get this kind of boost. As a result, some people who previously gave blood no longer do. It makes sense, but the idea that paying people to do something makes them stop doing it takes some getting used to.

The original suggestion was made by RIchard Titmuss in 1970, but it was met by what some Swedish researchers refer to (presumably overly-generously) as "skepticism", including rebuttals by two Nobel prize winners (Arrow, Solow).

And yet it looks like Titmuss was right and Arrow and Solow wrong. There have been some recent theoretical studies on it too (Benabou and Tirole). The reasoning is similar to the work by Akerlof and Kranton that is the subject of Chapter 11.

Lordi

Guess what? One of the people on my blogroll is Lordi, who just won the much-derided Eurovision Song Contest!

Well, nearly. See the always-interesting FinnSense for more.

Paradigm-Busting

I got my author copies of the book today.

Pretty exciting!

It looks good - the cover is the tipped over shopping cart/trolley that I posted a couple of posts down. The colour (turquoise with a touch of grey, if that makes any sense) works, and I like the image a lot.

The book is a trade paperback size (6" by 10") and its 240 pages are in a well-spaced, good sized, easy to read font (Stone). There's a continuity between the cover and the inside - the fonts for the headings are repeated on the cover, and the star that is used as a separator between sections is used again on the cover (a reference to Wal*Mart). There's even a shade of grey inside, used for the chapter numbers, which gives a slightly classier feel.

I hadn't seen the index (done by yours truly) in final form before, and it looks fine. I didn't end up putting any of those Easter Eggs in that you see in some indexes (eg, No Logo has an index entry for "index, puzzling self reference to" on page 437 (or something) which is, of course, the page the index entry appears on). Still, there is something oddly personal about indexes - there can't be too many that have all of the following index entries in them:

asymmetric information
beer
Dirty Pretty Things
focal point effect
gene stacking
hydrogen bomb
intermolecular forces
organized crime
Qin, Emperor of China
Ulysses Unbound (Jon Elster)
van der Waals, Johannes
wildebeeste

And as a bonus, there is a great review comment on the back from Jim Stanford, Canadian Auto Workers economist, Globe and Mail columnist, and an energetic commentator in many places. Here's what he has to say:

Conservatives dress up their destructive policy prescriptions in the language of 'individual choice.' Tom Slee's paradigm-busting book shows there are other, better ways for society to make choices. Marvelous and timely.

Now that's a lot better than "uneven" from the other day.

Book Review

Good news! the first review of No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart has appeared!

Bad news: it's not what I'd call glowing.

Nevertheless, in the interests of full and fair disclosure, and gritting my teeth, I hereby reproduce the whole thing. I understand that the protocol for real authors is that you don't criticize reviews, and I'll do my best imitation of a real author and bite my tongue.

It's from the June 2006 edition of Quill & Quire, p. 51.

Anyone who has tried to shepherd a child through the endless rows of toys in a department store with the proviso that only one item may be purchased knows the emotional devastation that can be wrought from the dilemma of too many choices. It's the deceptive nature of choice in our society that provides the focal point for Tom Slee's philosophical inquiry into how and why we do certain things, even when our decisions conflict with our moral compass.

Slee, a research scientist and software professional, is intrigued by the notion that a society marketing itself as full of wondrous choices is nonetheless marked by a happiness quotient that's in continual decline.

We do have choices, from whether or not to smoke, drive vehicles with poor safety records, eat foods high in trans fats, or buy certain brands of shoes and clothing. But Slee wonders whether those choices are determined by free will or are driven by a hidden hand, a cultural subtext that provides only the illusion of freedom.

To illustrate his points, Slee creates a number of scenarios in the fictitious community of Whimsley, where Jack and Jill deal with issues such as the conflict between shopping in a suburban big box or supporting downtown independent stores, or the pros and cons of using lawyers during a divorce. All of these things, Slee argues, involve different levels of choice, and in some situations, a lack of choice actually results in a better outcome. He also explores the world of game theory with respect to choice, and analyzes the role of what he calls MarketThink -- the logic of the so-called free market that has driven economics for the past few decades (also known as globalization or corporate control).

Unfortunately, Slee's approach is often difficult to follow as he tries to piece together these various strands. It's almost as if Slee falls victim to having too many choices with regard to settling on a writing style, making for an uneven text that could have benefited from more coherence and continuity. Slee also makes numerous references to the notion of collective action as an alternative to MarketThink, but this thesis is never really developed, leaving the reader wondering why Slee chose not to explore what seems like a logical conclusion to the book's central issue. - Matthew Behrens, a writer and editor in Toronto.

Oddly enough, I actually knew Mr. Behrens slightly many years ago.

How could this review be rephrased? how about this?

emotional ... philosopical ... moral.

Oh well. On to the next one!

Lots of cars => fond of cars?

I don't have much to stay about this - I just need a place to keep a quote.

Here is an paragraph from Saturday's (May 6) Kitchener-Waterloo Record, which ran a survey about the most important issues that Waterloo Region will have to deal with in the next five years.  The big ones are public goods: transport, healthcare, population growth, and clean water. There is a significant fall-off after that to taxes, almagamation, infrastructure, education, and housing.

Anyway, here it is:

Statistics from Waterloo regional police suggest residents here are fond of their cars. Since 1993, the region's population has increased about 15 per cent while the number of cars registered in the region jumped about 34 percent. Registered vehicles in the region totalled 228,000 in 1993. Today, that figure is 390,000.

You do see this logic all the time. It uses an implicit revealed preference argument: we have bought more cars, so we must like them (be fond of them). It's at the root of a lot of the claims about consumer sovereignty and the economy.  But it's wrong, of course. Buying a car (or not) is a reaction to the transport system you live in, not an expression of some kind of fondness, and a small change that helps to shape that transport system.

Book Launch!

The date for a book launch at the local bookstore has been set. Here's the poster (click to enlarge).