lost between the letters

I came down with a nasty stomach bug last night which prevents me from focusing on any great insight. I shall therefor simply pass on another little chunk of excellent prose from this very dense book I am still working my way through (when was the last time I took more than a week to read a book I was enjoying as much as this one?) The text I have chosen is mildly self serving. See if you can figure out why.

The book: Spent by Geoffrey Miller

The chapter: The Centrifugal Soul

The topic: Ways to put a dent in our spending and signal our fitness in more productive ways.

The concepts (a partial list): Don't buy things, Use what you have, Borrow, Rent, Buy it Used, Make it Yourself, Have it Made Locally, to your Specifications, Wait, Ask for it as a Gift, etc.

The excerpt: "Many families buy mass-designed houses built in alienating new suburbs by huge developers. The structures are designed to the lowest common denominator of taste in the current fashion so their aesthetic value depresses quickly. They are built to poor standards - two-by-four stick lumber and half-inch Sheetrock on concrete slabs - so their physical integrity deteriorates quickly. The houses are not supported by adequate investment in surrounding infrastructure - roads, parks, schools well-planned retail - so their quality of life depreciates quickly. The result is that in many communities, five-year-old houses have lower equity value than new ones. A good alternative is to commission a distinctive new family house from and up-and-coming local architect on a vacant plot in and established community. The build cost per square foot may be slightly higher than for a mass-designed developer house, but the display value - and home equity - per dollar spent will be much higher. Instead of moving into a house built by nameless, faceless workers, you can move into a house that you codesigned with an architect who might become a friend, and a house that you saw being built by local workers whose names you'll learn and whose workmanship you'll admire. You'll also learn much more about the house, so its features and functions can be more knowledgeably appreciated by you and discussed with others. Whereas others live in houses they understand only superficially, you'll be able to understand all the systems - foundation, framing, roofing, flooring, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, storage, security, decorating - as functional wholes. You'll maintain them better and repair them more easily. And as the architect's reputation grows, your house's value will increase. This way of living makes a much more effective social display, because it grows social and narrative roots deep into one's local community, and so demonstrates one's creativity, openness, agreeableness, and extroversion much more credibly than buying a prebuilt mass-market house, which requires nothing more than a down payment, a decent credit score and gullibility." (266-267)

*Note: I'm not making this up to advertise Whole Trees. It's a real quote.

Posted by dihansmann at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Still reading Spent and the chapter I hit this morning before getting up sparked some interesting thoughts to kick off the day with. The chapter is titled "Conspicuous Waste, Precision and Reputation" and deals with the way humans demonstrate fitness in different ways.

This all based on the concept of "costly signaling" - basically the evolutionary advertising technique of showing that you are so evolutionarily fit that you can afford to waste energy on visible but useless attributes like a peacock's tail or overly elaborate nest of a bower bird. Such signaling is indirect - the peacock's tail doesn't actually indicate intelligence or high fertility or fill-in-the-blank item on a peahen's wish list - it merely shows that the peacock is so competent at finding food for itself, fending off opponents and generally managing his life that he can do all that and still carry around that ridiculous fan all day long. (90-111)

Humans use a lot of costly signaling to let everyone else know how fit we are. The thrust of this chapter is to break down the different types of signaling that we choose to make use of. Miller cites Thorstein Veblen's book The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he coined the term "conspicuous consumption" and proposed that the main human purpose in buying costly items is not to make the purchaser happy but to display to everyone else that they are able to. His theory is that "animals, including humans, often show off the most expensive signals they can afford, whether those signals are peacock tails or Hummer H1s." And that such those signals are made costly through "conspicuous waste" of the individual's available resources. (114-115)

Miller's point though is that there are multiple types of cost demonstrations. Human signals costs can include time, attention, diligence, physical risk or social risk. As he breaks it down; conspicuous waste, conspicuous precision or conspicuous reputation. (115-119) Where I really got sidetracked was his comparison of the moral and efficiency of these three forms. "Aristocrats differ from the nouveaux riches not in their freedom from consumerism, but in their preference for conspicuous precision and reputation ('the finer things in life') over conspicuous waste ('the crass and vulgar')." (120) And he warns that people are always least likely to recognize their own preferred type of display as cost signaling. Conspicuous waste is easy to recognize and deplore and for my purposes I'll call it the McMansion school of display. The most square footage with the fanciest facade and very little attention to genuine quality or provenance of material and workmanship. I have always identified this as conspicuous consumption and (therefore) bad. But conspicuous precision is also a fitness signaling tactic. We can call this the Not-So-Big-House school of display. As Sarah Susanka created the idea - not-so-big-ness means reducing overall space, both by making individual spaces more efficient and compact and by eliminating unnecessary traditional spaces from the house altogether, but also increasing the quality of each part of the house, in design, materiality and craftsmanship. Finally conspicuous reputation in housing choice is an historic, or better yet, famous house. Frank Lloyd Wright would be the obvious choice but I've rejected his works in favor of the Farnsworth house for my little triptych at the top of the page because he annoys me today (and most days). Each of these three types obviously involves some degree of both of the others but the point of living in a house designed by Wright isn't that you are so rich you can afford to heat it despite the notoriously leaky windows or pay for emergency room treatment every time the low lintel gives you or your guests a concussion but that you are rich enough to afford something quite rare that most people have heard of. So it still falls under the category of conspicuous reputation rather than waste.

Breaking expensive housing types down into these three categories was enormously helpful for me because it identifies the underlying unrest I've always felt about the Not-So-Big-House movement. It seemed like it was indicating a move away from conspicuous consumption and yet still the homes Susanka featured were still enormous in comparison with those of any other country and filled with costly features that still seemed somewhat superfluous. The fact that it is simply a shift from one type of fitness signaling to another makes it much more understandable. We've been making that shift consistently through the twentieth century, as Miller puts it, we have "shifted status away from the engineers of the very large (trains, battleships, skyscrapers) to the engineers of the very small (electronics, biotech, nanotech)." (122)

To conclude, "it seems unlikely that people will ever relinquish their runaway quest for self-display, as the failures of communism and hippie utopianism showed all to clearly. (Note that Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR and Kiety Richards of the Rolling Stones are now both appearing in ads for Louis Vuitton luggage.) Yet, people's modes of self-display are quite flexible, ... [and] ... may one day be shifted from our current antisocial, irresponsible unreliable forms of conspicuous waste, precision and reputation to more pro-social conscientious, reliable forms that still let people make a living." (127)

Posted by dihansmann at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'm reading a fascinating new book by Geoffry Miller called Spent: Sex Evolution and Consumer Behavior (Viking, 2009). The main thrust of the book is to apply evolutionary psychology (a sort of What Would a Cave Person Do or WWCPD view of the world) to the consumer choices and their consequences that create the world we live in. I'm interested and appalled and can't really tell which I feel more. He points out that Marketing, the power behind the throne in this worldview is not a fancy type of advertizing but rather a bona fide scientific revolution. In the business world this all began in middle of the century and "came with that wonderful sense of inevitability that accompanies all scientific revolutions. That a company should produce what people desire, instead of trying to convince people to buy what the company happens to make, was a radical idea that seems obvious only in retrospect." But the principals of Marketing have been around much longer than they have been applied to business. He identifies democracy in the political realm and the protestant reformation in religion as marketing oriented concepts which redirected a top down producer focused system into consumer friendly people power arrangements.

The above mentioned thought experiment is from the preface of the book which asks us to imagine going back in time to explain our current way of living to our Cro-Magnon ancestors and see if "the prospect of ever-greater prosperity, leisure, and knowledge motivate them to invent agriculture, animal husbandry, walled towns, money, social classes and conspicuous consumption?" In the Q and A, Caveman Gerard (this is prehistoric France, after all) asks if this money stuff will allow him to buy 20 wives, greater intelligence, longer life, advanced personal weaponry to defeat his rivals, the undying loyalty of his love or at least more tolerable personalities for her mother and sisters. You have to answer: no, no, no, no, no and no. His mate Giselle is interested in "a handsome, high-status charming lover who wil never ignore me, beat me or leave me," better childcare, the respect of her teenage children or a mammoth carcass that never rots and you have to disappoint her as well. Finally when Juliette, Cro-Magnon Matriarch asks what it takes to get all this supposedly great stuff anyway and you answer "All you have to do is sit in classrooms every day for sixteen years to learn counter intuitive skills, and then work and commute fifty hours a week for forty years in a tedious job for amoral corporations, far away from relatives and friends, without any decent child care, sense of community, political empowerment or contact with nature. Oh and you'll have to take special medicines to avoid suicidal despair and to avoid having more than two children." Then they kick you out of the campfire circle.
The most fascinating thing to note at this stage of the book (I'm only on page 45, btw) is that all this marketing doesn't seem to lead to materialism. Because the focus is on brand identification and the power of association, or as he puts it, "a narcissistic pseudospiritualism based on subjective pleasure, social status, romance and lifestyle, as a product's mental associations become more important than its actual physical qualities." These associations, then, with their brand specific characteristics, are all that a company can use to get you to pick their product as opposed to any other. His example is bottled water which I consider to be so much of a case in point that I won't bother to go into it. The end to which all this marketing appears to lead, then, isn't a house groaning under the weight of mountains of stuff but a sort of Neil Stephenson future in which we detach from reality and move into self created alternate realities formed the better to identify ourselves with the appropriate associative characteristics.

All of which is by way of saying that now that I'm done with Michael Crichton I'm needing to read Snow Crash again.

Posted by dihansmann at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The book of the week (day?) is Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. I haven’t read it in several years but it is just as good as I recalled – chock full of colorful language, dangerous dinosaurs, greedy corporate muckety-mucks and smart people snarking their way out of desperate situations. Actually it follows the Crichton formula to a T but I don’t really mind as I like the formula.
It runs through so many of his books I can write a recipe for it. Take one technology related company and mix in one or two ruthless and short sighted executives who break the laws of nature and the United States to turn a profit and achieve their ends. Add one to four really smart scientific specialists who will get roped in based on having accepted grant funding from the aforementioned corporate creeps. Include the merest hint of a romance between two of these but don’t go anywhere with it. Some initial crisis with the corporate enterprise will involve all of the above and a few intermediately moral characters in an incipient adventure, usually in some geographically (or temporally) isolated location. Allow the whole thing to stew for something just shy of a week while the situation progresses from bad to worse and the clever scientists try to save themselves and everyone else while the corporate scumbags deny that anything is going wrong and generally make things worse. Eventually nearly everyone except most (but not all) of the scientists will die – usually in rather dramatically painful ways. A certain amount of cosmic retribution will be dealt out to the corporate entity. But in the end the survivors shake it off and return to their research (supported by the huge payouts they get to pad their non-disclosure agreements) and the company covers its ass and claims none of it ever happened. Off the top of my head I have just perfectly described Jurassic Park, the Lost World, Congo, Timeline and Prey. It’s a less perfect summary of Airframe but that is harder to fit into the type as the whole thing takes place in California. But still … you take my point.

Continue reading ""The morphine is making me philosophical."" »

Posted by dihansmann at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As big an Austen fan as I am, I have to admit I never really had any interest in Northanger Abbey. In fact I never bothered to read it at all. But watching the truly delightful recent PBS adaptation with my sister last week finally piqued my interest to the point that I got my hands on it. I was almost immediately laughing out loud. Here's a sample of the dialogue - a conversation between Mr. Tilney and Catherine at their first meeting:

“I see what you think of me,” said he gravely – “I shall make but a poor figure in your journal tomorrow.”
“My Journal!”
“Yes, I know exactly what you will say: Friday went to the Lower rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings – plain black shoes – appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed my by his nonsense.”
“Indeed I shall say no such thing.”
“Shall I tell you what you ought to say?”
“If you please.”
“I danced with a very agreeable young man, introduced by Mr. King; had a great deal of conversation with him – seems a most extraordinary genius –hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to say.”
“But, perhaps, I keep no journal.”
“Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dressed to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? – My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies’ ways as you with to believe me; it Is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is particularly female. Nature my have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.”
“I have sometimes thought,” said Catherine, doubtingly, “whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen! That is – I should not think the superiority was always on our side.”
“As far as I have ad opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars.”
“And what are they?”
“A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.”
“Upon my word! I need not have been afraid of disclaiming the compliment. You do not think to highlight of us in that way.”
“I should no more lay it down as a general rule that women write better letters than men, than that they sing better duets, or draw better landscapes. In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.”

For journal, lets put in "blog". Although, for that matter, I do keep a journal.

Posted by dihansmann at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Book Report: Prince Caspian

I picked up my copy of Prince Caspian over the weekend. This is no small feat as the copy I have is the silly movie edition hardcover with all the books bound into one - it was a present. I needed to answer a question raised in conversation. What is the order in which the Pevensie sibs buy into Lucy's claim that Aslan has been spotted and wants them to go the other way? I saw the film again a couple weeks ago and wanted to compare. Susan and the DLF are no brainers - he holds out because he doesn't believe and she does because she's a lazy whiner grump (who'd be an older sister?). But which of the boys comes around first?

My guess was Peter. Lewis isn't all that nuanced in his characterizations so the two boys usually keep to their stated roles: High King Peter, the magnificent, and King Edmund, the just ... not quite as magnificent as Peter. The film version tried, very admirably, to introduce individual motivations for each character so they had played up Peter's angry teen potential which causes a lot of useful conflict in the plot both in his relationship to Caspian and generally in all his plans for how to deal with the situation. Plus the movie team knows that they have to sell us on the idea of Edmund (with Lucy and Caspian) heading up a third installment so they want to make sure we like him. So in the film we get Edmund very sensibly reminding us that Lucy is usually right about everything in Narnia so how about they all follow her advice. As it turns out it works that way in the book too. He votes with Lucy to go uphill and Peter breaks the tie (not so magnificent at that moment) based on the logic that "sorry Lucy, but we had to go one way or the other." Nice one, Peter.

Anyway, having answered my question I kept reading. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia well into young adult hood but at a certain point the religious imagery started to bang me over the head a bit too hard. All of a sudden the narrative voice seemed preachy and condescending and almost overnight I couldnt' stand to hear that voice. The plots were still fun but the story was ruined. Which was why the two films have struck me as so totally delightful - all of the adventure and fun with the same beloved characters and none of CS Lewis looking over his glasses and saying "Now, children, as I'm sure you know ..." I rather wrote the books off. But there's been another change in my perceptions. As I started going through it I was hardly troubled by the storytelling and totally delighted by some of the language. Here are a few examples that struck me as so delightful I wrote them down. For the time being I'm going to choose to believe that Lewis knew what an obnoxious tone he was striking and was doing it on purpose. Its a send up. Can I get any takers for this idea? Meanwhile its a delightful source of British English, a form of which I never tire.

"Take two order marks for talking nonsense."
He's been a brick.
"I am very much at his service - with my sword - whenever he has leisure."
They were certainly at it hammer and tongs now.
"Now I am a dotard as well as a dastard?"
Full battle was joined.
"Bother," said Edmund, "Ive left my new torch in Narnia."

Posted by dihansmann at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Frankly not nearly as interesting as I had hoped it would be based on an excellent introduction and the precedent set by Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist (XXXX). The book consists mainly of writing assignment prompts that the author, Robert H. Frank, gave to his intro econ classes at Cornell. It asks a number of moderately interesting questions - Why is it more expensive to transfer funds between banks electronically than send a check through the mail? If we have a Blockbuster Video why don’t we have a Blockbuster Book? Why might an appliance retailer hammer dents into the sides of its stoves and refrigerators? – but answers them only in brief. In fact its not entirely clear if Frank is using his student’s proposed questions and then answering them himself or if the entire book is a patchwork of his student’s essays answering their own questions. In either case they aren’t answered with nearly the rigor or detail that they really seem to deserve. Damn, because armchair economics has the potential to be so interesting.

By far the best part of the book is the introduction, which begins with a grammar joke:
“A woman lands at Logan Airport, grabs her luggage, jumps into a cab, hungry for a good New England seafood dinner. “Take me to a place where I can get scrod,” she tells the diver. Eyebrow arched, the cabbie turns and says, “That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say that in the pluperfect subjunctive.”
Frank then goes on to explain that the joke only really works because most people don’t know exactly what the pluperfect subjunctive is (I didn’t). But then also that it doesn’t matter. He extends this into a criticism of traditional language courses. “If learning to speak a new language is your goal, the time and effort required to learn the explicit technical details of this tense would be far better spent in other ways. Courses that focus most of their energy on such details are no fun for students, and they’re also astonishingly ineffective.” He compares his experience in high school and college language courses to the stripped down and more effective crash course he was given in Nepalese before being sent out by the Peace Corps. The analogy – linguistics to economics – is that it’s much more important to understand a few basic principles and illustrate them with useful examples then to focus all your study on abstruse and obscure technical details.

Frank, Robert. 2007. The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas. New York: Basic Books.

Posted by dihansmann at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read an amazing thing while walking to work in a coffee shop (I love town work days) on Thursday morning and reading The Invisible Sex as I went. The book covers the vast topic of the role of women and females in prehistory and serves largely as a prodding debunker to point out blind spots or inaccuracies in previous assumptions made by the largely male archeological community about how early humans lived and worked. Its an interesting overall read with easy journalistic prose moving smoothly from one rather heavy weather science topic to another.

Continue reading "Book Report: The Invisible Sex" »

Posted by dihansmann at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)