Ditch the bookmarks!

Dorothy L Sayers, from a short essay entitled A Note on Creative Reading (from the back of a book called Begin Here, which was published during the Second World War and deals with economics and Germany and politics and a good deal more). 

Which reminds me: please burn all your book-markers - even the pretty one Aunt Mabel sent you last Christmas (or at least put that one away and only bring it out when she comes to call.) You cannot possibly be so bird-witted as to be unable to discover which page you got to by looking at it.
If the author mentions some other book in terms which make it seem important, whether he approves or refutes it, don't take his word for it: get the other book and read it, and judge for yourself. If he refers to something, or uses a word, which you don't understand, get a dictionary or work of reference and look it up. (Don't write and ask the author to explain; he is not required to be an Encyclopaedia, and you will only give him a poor idea of your industry and intelligence.) Especially, examine the sources of what he writes; to read Mr Somebody's critical valuation of Milton's prose or his examination of the economic effects of the Peace-Treaty is quite valueless if you have never read any Milton and do not know what the Peace-Treaty actually said.

How times have changed, you might say. I don't at all agree with her view of bookmarks because I'm plainly bird-witted enough to need them to find my place. It must speak volumes about my lack of attention to what I'm reading (!)
As for asking the author to explain: these days authors are all too ready to explain, and enjoy discussions with their readers. Or so we're led to believe. It's one of the joys and perils of the Internet. You can drop an author an email or even a tweet without blinking. And mostly they will reply...quickly. 

Dan Pink and economics

I've made note of this video before in another blog, but not here.   The voice you hear is Dan Pink.   He's describing a peculiar thing that is contrary to what should happen - according to economists.  Their theory is that the bigger the incentive the better the work.   (Obviously they haven't looked at some of these people who've been grossly overpaid, given even grosser bonuses, and still done a poor job.   The CEO of BP is a prime example: he's about to walk out of his job with a $17m severance.)   However, the reality is that people will work for purpose more than payment because purpose is far more satisfying.   Hence the reasoning behind Linux, or Wikipedia and many other examples.

The video's quite long, but it's superbly done.  An artist draws what Pink says throughout: not only his words, but also pictures and often additional comments visually or verbally.   Quite apart from its content, it's just great to watch.



I'm told this has something do with what's known as 'swarms' - not entirely sure at this point what that refers to.

Finding our way back to ethics

...we have lost a way of thinking and talking about some very important things. The preoccupation with market ­efficiency and economic growth has loomed so large that other activities, and other ­values, have been subordinated to its disciplines. "You can't buck the market," said Margaret Thatcher, and no government has disagreed since. It was the adage that was used to justify soaring pay for the highest earners and stagnant earnings for the low-paid. The ­market ruled, and questions of injustice, honour or integrity were all secondary or irrelevant.

A poll for the World Economic Forum last month found in 10 G20 countries that two-thirds of respondents attributed the credit crunch and its ensuing economic recession to a crisis of ethics and values. Sir Thomas Legg declared in his final report on MPs' expenses that there had been a failure of ethics. There's a widespread perception that social norms have subtly and gradually shifted towards the centrality of ­personal self-interest. As long as it's legal, it's legitimate; no further ­individual judgment is necessary.

Madeleine Bunting in an article entitled To tackle the last decades' myths, we must dust off the big moral questions, published in The Guardian, 21st Feb, 2010.

Wendell Berry

Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of industrial economics.
Local life may be as much endangered by those who would 'save the planet' as by those would 'conquer the world.' For 'saving the planet' calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know - and thus will destroy - the integrity of local nature and local community.

Proposition number XVII in Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse, an essay in the book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community.

I suppose it could be said that Berry's own proposition deals with an abstraction: 'the enemy wherever it is found.' But I wouldn't dare to criticise the great essayist!

Curious indeed

Finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon this afternoon. It’s a strange book that grips you while annoying you; that’s funny even in the dark moments; and that gets you sufficiently inside the head of someone with Asperger’s to make you appreciate just how difficult their life can be. Haddon says in an interview with Dave Weich of Powells.com, that a woman from a publishing office who’d read the book said, "Oh, I didn't realize there was actually anything wrong with Christopher." This seems almost too naïve for words. What on earth did she think was going on? Yet, the book never explains anything except through the main character’s voice - because he only sees things through his own filter - and so you have to deduce a great deal about him from the clues that appear. Perhaps she isn’t the deducing kind of reader.
I enjoyed it, but don’t know that I’d recommend it readily to other people, mostly because I don’t know how they’d react to it. You can be enthusiastic about what you feel is a great book only to find other people snubbing it. (As happened to me with Freakonomics, which I thoroughly enjoyed.)
Anyway, I’m glad I picked the book up at a Car Boot Sale recently - I’d already been tempted to buy it at Sainsbury’s supermarket, but kept putting it back. So instead of paying £4 for it, I got it for one.

Economics and the Circus

Want a good book to read on a plane trip? Freakonomics is the one – well, for me, anyway!
It’s made economics (a subject I’ve despised since I first came across it at an adult commerce class years ago) into something that’s readable, interesting, quirky and even fun. Of course, it took a mind like Steven Levett’s to bring me to that change of view, but that’s fine. Usually I’m prepared to have my mind changed in regard to my opinions – though my wife doesn’t always agree that that’s the case.
Again and again Freakonomics throws up two seemingly unrelated subjects and works out whether they have more in common than you’d think. I don’t suppose Levett actually sat down and said how can I contrast two totally unrelated subjects; there’s a good deal of thought behind his writing. Nevertheless, he manages to ask crazy questions and show that they’re not so crazy after all.
The writing is a symbiosis: Levett can certainly write without the help of Dubner, but it was Dubner who got the book off the ground. Levett is almost too busy to sit down and write a book.
I don’t know that I can pinpoint what it is about the book that intrigues me so much. Maybe it’s just the lateral thinking approach, something I’ve always enjoyed. Applying it to a subject I’ve seldom enjoyed (I’ve regarded economists as being about as reliable as weatherforecasters) has meant I’ve got access into economics, stats, sociology in a way I’d never have considered possible. I’d compare Levett’s free-ranging approach perhaps to the way Le Cirque du Soleil has changed people’s idea of what the word ‘circus’ means.

There's now a Freakonomics blog as well.