Where would you go on a shopping spree?
A used bookstore is the only possible answer, but even then “spree” would generally be excessive for my volume of purchases – by common usage.
I’ve never been a recreational shopper. But, as “sprees” go, I’ve gone on more of the shopping kind than the murdering kind. Funny, those are the only kinds of sprees I’m aware of. I guess something has to die to make it a spree.
Well, they were Timberland hiking boots, a pair that was comfortable and had served me well on a number of hikes in various parts of the world. Then, on the Goechala Pass Trek in Sikkim, I learned that they were only held together by some planned-obsolescent glue.
I had to hike six days with one of the soles strapped to my foot for one of the boots, and five days for the other. Yes, after so many miles of hiking in various environments, they fell apart within one day of each other. I guess the glue has a finite number of puddle steps in it, and I hit that number one day earlier with one boot than the other. That’s when I realized there’s nothing special about a shoe. It’s just a bunch of the lowest cost materials stuck together in the lowest cost assembly method and designed so you’ll have to buy a new pair every few months to years, depending upon the type of shoe, its use, and its price point. If there were a monopoly on shoe production, no pair would last more than a week. It’s only competition that allows for some halfway decent pairs to exist. I’m happy with any shoe that protects my feet, and — once it doesn’t — it’s dead to me.
That’s a tough one. It wouldn’t be an alma mater because I agree with John Mulaney that colleges are like the heroin-addicted relative who is forever asking everyone for money. Collecting money from so many sources (tuition, grants, sports team licensing, and donations — corporate & individual) and still raising tuition at a rate several times that of inflation does not speak to sound money management.
Disease research sounds like a good idea… at first. Except a huge portion of it is done in the United States, and America is number one in per capita medical expenditures (by a large margin) while being around 20th in health outcomes. This, also, doesn’t speak to great money management. If the solution was a million-dollar medicine or a billion-dollar surgery they would find it, but if the solution is a ten-dollar medicine or a free exercise, there’s not a chance.
A social program would be a great idea if I could find one that didn’t make it cheaper / easier to make more human beings. Probably the single biggest problem of the planet is that people already don’t treat the decision to have children as a decision, but rather treat it as some sort of Pavlovian response to reaching a certain birthday.
So, I guess I’m left with leaving it to a random person on the street corner who seems nice enough. Then, I wouldn’t have any expectations that it would amount to anything. Ooh… could I give it to a street dog with no human middleman? That’s the one.
There was a shrewd carpenter from Zambia dismayed to hear what was paid to IKEA. He took apart his shelves, said, "Make 'em yourselves!" upped his rates, but threw in a hex key-a.
We were classed: Consumer.
And that became our task.
The stores grew like tumors,
and in stuff piles we basked.
Artpreneur: The Step-by-Step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living from Your Creativity by Miriam Schulman
Introducing Game Theory: A Graphic Guide by Ivan Pastine
Comic Book History of Comics: Comics for All by Fred Van Lente
Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The book’s premise is simple: being neat and tidy isn’t the great virtue you’ve been led to believe, and being messy isn’t inherently a vice. Over nine chapters, Harford explores the various dimensions in which our impulse to toward tidiness can get in our way, and for which a little messiness might be the cure. Each chapter uses a central story or two as exemplars, with other stories and anecdotes providing support.
The book’s introduction sets up the idea by describing a famous concert in Köln (Cologne) by Kieth Jarrett in which the pianist reluctantly agreed to play the concert on a sub-par piano, and (it’s argued because of the limitations of that instrument) went on to produce the best-selling solo jazz album. This tale sets up chapter one, which focuses on creativity, nicely. Creativity may be explicitly the topic of chapter one, but it’s a concept that cuts across the entirety of the book. Tidiness – it is argued — is antagonistic to creativity. In the first chapter, Harford describes how David Bowie partnered up with Brian Eno, and how Eno’s “oblique strategies” – while they annoyed the musicians to no end by throwing monkey wrenches into the act of making music – were highly successful in producing a unique sound.
Chapter two discusses collaboration, which always makes a mess. Central to this chapter is a discussion of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős and the famous Erdős number that virtually all scholars are familiar with — at least those in who work in math, science, engineering, and other disciplines with a quantitative bent. It’s sort of a Kevin Bacon six-degrees-of-separation for those who make mathematics. The number describes how far removed one is from having a paper penned with this notoriously prolific mathematician (co-authored, one removed co-author, etc.,) and everyone publishing quantitative / mathematical scholarship desired a low number. The point made by Harford wasn’t just that collaboration in general is messy, but that working with Erdős, specifically, was, and it required collaborators to adjust to his peculiar, professorial ways.
Chapter three explores how tidy workplaces sometimes hinder productivity. The central case is MIT’s Building 20, which was popped up in record time to meet a wartime demand. The building housed a disproportionate amount of world-class science and engineering, and it’s argued that this was in part because its poor design put random people together on long walks to exits or toilets, and in part because – since it was a hideous monstrosity of a building – no one cared if its labs and offices were a mess or not.
Chapter four delves into the value of mess in improvisation. Of course, Jazz is revisited in this chapter, but the lead story is Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech and how it came out of being forced by circumstance to abandon his usual process of extensive preparation and editing. Chapter five describes messy tactics as winning strategies. Erwin Rommel’s success by disruption and chaos creation is at the heart of this chapter as is the development of Britain’s SAS which sometimes beat Rommel at his own game by using a similar approach using smaller, more agile, and more elite forces. There is also an extensive discussion of how Amazon went from humble beginnings to being the 800 pound gorilla of online shopping.
The sixth chapter investigates the role of incentives. For an economist, this is a fascinating topic as the key to understanding economic behavior is usually to follow the incentives. Of course, unintended consequences often go hand in hand with attempts to produce / manipulate incentives. Much of this chapter describes how attempts to tie up loose ends through regulation have ended up generating worse outcomes than could ever have been anticipated.
The next chapter (ch. 7) is about automation, which could be seen as an attempt to clean up messy activities. Harford discusses the situation with self-driving cars, which it’s hoped will help to make highways safer. However, the case he concentrates on is that of flight Air France 447, which went down in part because its inexperienced pilot at the helm couldn’t cope when the fly-by-wire system designed to anticipate and smooth the pilot’s inputs into the controls suddenly went off-line. In other words, the junior pilot wasn’t used to flying messy.
Chapter 8 is about resilience, and here the author challenges the age-old economic notion that specialization always results in greater productivity. Harford suggests that diversity and intermixing of activities and people – rather than specialization and homogenization – often results in a better outcome. The final chapter takes a wider view at how being messy can help one in life. The author spends a great deal of space to the question of how on-line dating services do such a poor job – spoiler alert – they try to make the messy process of finding a soul mate neat and tidy.
The book has citations and end-notes. In the Kindle edition, these notes are hyperlinked for ease of use. There are no graphics, but they aren’t missed.
I enjoyed reading this book and found it to offer many fascinating cases. I will say, as I was reading these well-researched and interestingly described cases, I sometimes had to think hard (maybe do some mental gymnastics) to make the connection between the case at hand and the book’s central theme – leaving me to wonder if I was missing something or whether there wasn’t some shoe-horning of interesting anecdotes into the book to produce a work that was more about being interesting than about proving a particular point. That said, I would recommend the book, particularly for anyone interested in increasing their creativity, productivity, or both.
NOTE: I already did a post of the books published in 2017 that had the most profound effect on me. That post can be seen here. This one is about books I read in 2017, most of which weren’t published this year. The hyperlinks go to my GoodReads review of the respective book.
5.) Narconomics by Tom Wainwright: This is a look at how drug cartels have been drawing from the playbooks of successful multinational corporations to make their operations more efficient and profitable. It contains gripping journalism and–for an economics wonk such as myself–it hits the spot with regards to scholarly curiosity as well.
4.) The Man Who Wasn’t There by Anil Ananthaswamy: Neuroscience has been converging on a conclusion drawn by Buddhists long ago (though not necessarily sharing identical explanations /mechanisms) that the self is an illusion. Ananthaswamy considers the neuroscience of self by examining how nervous system ailments and injuries have challenged common explanations about what the self is based on what it feels to be a self. (e.g. Out-of-body experiences can be induced with electrodes. Some people deeply feel they are dead, or that they either have limbs that aren’t present or that limbs that are don’t belong to them.)
3.) The Way of the Iceman by Wim Hof and Koen De Jong: Any book that can get one to start taking cold showers has to be pretty persuasive. Wim Hof is known for his cold endurance “stunts,” but his argument in this book is that anyone can do it and that there are health benefits to doing so. The authors report on the science of said benefits as well as offering a program to start one’s way on such a program.
2.) Trying Not to Try by Edward Slingerland: Slingerland brings a fresh look at the ancient Chinese concept of wu-wei (apparently pronounced “ooo-way.”) Wu-wei is variously translated as “actionless action” or “to do without doing,” and–while that may sound like meaningless bumper-sticker wisdom–it reflects a state of effortless action that requires an elusive but powerful state of mind. Slingerland presents varied Taoist and Confucian approaches to the subject, but also relates the idea to modern ideas such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow.”
1.) How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman: A neuroscientist and a positive psychologist team up to explain the common routes to the enlightened states of mind described in both Eastern religious / spiritual traditions and the mystic branches of Western religions (i.e. Jewish Kabbalah, mystic Christian sects, and Sufi Islam,) as well as their scientific underpinnings.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 