...Comedians have rules of their own about joke-stealing. And they impose their own punishments on thieves... Why do comedians do this? In part, because they live in a world where intellectual property law – in particular, copyright – does not help them much when a rival comedian steals a joke... lawsuits are simply too expensive and uncertain to work as an effective response... Today’s comics are intent on enforcing ownership rights. Yet they do so via social norms – informal but nonetheless powerful rules enforced by comedians on their peers... Comedians maintain a small list of commandments that every comic must follow – or risk being ostracized, boycotted, and sometimes worse. These norms track copyright law at times... More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas...I might quibble with the definition of social norms as rules enforced by fear of reprisal, but that's a minor point and, given my previous comments about Freakonomics, I have to give credit where credit is due.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
In keeping with the season
Here's an April Fool's Day piece on joke-stealing, social norms and intellectual property (via Mark Thoma):
Two thoughts on April Fool's Day blogging
1. I'd better be careful linking to any too-good-to-be-true stories.
2. Wait a minute! This is the blogosphere; how much less reliable can it get?
2. Wait a minute! This is the blogosphere; how much less reliable can it get?
Skipping the math
From Felix Salmon:
Justin Fox sums up the overwhelming majority of economics papers in one sentence:The basic form of an academic economics paper is a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the beginning and a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the end, with a bunch of really-hard-to-follow math or statistical analysis in the middle.
What he doesn’t (need to) mention is the way that journalists, myself included, read economics papers: we generally have no ability or inclination to try to understand the details of the formulae and regression analyses, so we confine ourselves to reading the stuff in English, and work on the general assumption that the mathematics is reasonably solid.
The problem of course is that we really have no basis for making that general assumption: we make it not because we think it’s particularly justified or justifiable, but because we don’t have any choice. What’s more, because we’re always interested in what’s new, and because we have easy access to the internet and little access to expensive journals, we gravitate to preprints at sites like SSRN, rather than papers which have gone through peer review.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Blockbusters, Franchises and Apostrophes
More on the economics of genre fiction
The story so far: last week Andrew Gelman had a post on a book that discussed the dominance of best seller lists and suggested that it was due to their increased quality and respectability. I argued that the quality and respectability had if anything decreased (here), posted some background information (here and here) then discussed how the economics of publishing from the late Nineteenth Century through the Post-War era had influenced genre fiction. The following closes with a look at where we are now and how the current state of the market determines what we're seeing at the bookstore.
As the market shrank in the last part of the Twentieth Century, the pay scale shifted to the feast and (mostly) famine distribution of today. (The century also saw a similar shift for musicians, artists and actors.) Non-paying outlets sprang up. Fan fiction emerged (non-licensed use of characters had, of course, been around for years -- Tiajuana bibles being a classic example -- but fan fiction was written for the author's enjoyment without any real expectation of payment). These changes are generally blamed on the internet but the conventional wisdom is at least a couple of decades off. All of these trends were well established by the Seventies.
With the loss of the short story market and the consolidation of publishing, the economics of writing on spec became brutal. Writing and trying to sell a novel represents a tremendous investment of time and energy with little hope of success. By comparison writing on spec in the Forties meant coming up with twelve to fifteen pages then sending them off to twenty or so potential markets. The best of these markets paid good money; the worst were hungry for anything publishable.
The shift from short story to novel also meant greater risk for the publisher (and, though we don't normally think of it in these terms, for the reader who also invested money and time). A back-pages story that most readers skipped over might hurt the sales and reputation of a magazine slightly but as long as the featured stories were strong, the effect would be negligible. Novels though are free-standing and the novel gets that gets skipped over is the novel that goes unsold.
When Gold Medal signed John. D. MacDonald they knew were getting a skilled, prolific writer with a track record artistically and commercially successful short fiction. The same could be said about the signing of Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Joe Gores and many others. Publishing these first time authors was a remarkably low risk proposition.
Unfortunately for publishers today, there are no potential first time authors with those resumes. Publishers now have to roll the dice on inexperienced writers of unknown talent and productivity. In response to that change, they have taken various steps to mitigate the risk.
One response was the rise of the marketable blockbuster. The earliest example I can think of is the book Lace by Shirley Conran. If memory serves, Lace got a great deal of attention in the publishing world for Conran's huge advance, her lack of fiction-writing experience, and the role marketing played in the process. The general feeling was that the tagline ("Which one of you bitches is my mother? ") came first while the book itself was merely an afterthought.
More recently we have Dexter, a marketer's dream ("He's a serial killer who kills serial killers... It's torture porn you can feel good about!"). The author had a few books in his resume but nothing distinguished. The most notable was probably a collaboration with Star Trek actor Michael Dorn. The first book in the series, Darkly Dreaming Dexter was so poorly constructed that all of the principals had to act completely out of character to resolve the plot (tip for new authors: when a character casually overlooks her own attempted vivisection, it's time for a rewrite*).
The problems with the quality of the novel had no apparent effect on sales, nor did it prevent the character from appearing in a successful series of sequels and being picked up by Showtime (The TV show was handled by far more experienced writers who managed to seal up almost all of the plot holes).
The point here is not that Darkly Dreaming Dexter was a bad book or that publishing standards have declined. The point is that the economics have changed. Experienced fiction writers are more rare. Marketable concepts and franchises are more valuable, as is synergy with other media. The markets are smaller. There are fewer players. And much of the audience has a troublesome form of brand loyalty.
Normally of course brand loyalty is a plus, but books are an unusual case. If you convince a Coke drinker to also to drink Sprite you probably won't increase his overall soda consumption; you'll just have cannibalization. But readers who stick exclusively with one writer are severely underconsuming. Convince James Patterson readers to start reading Dean Koontz and you could double overall sales.
When most readers got their fiction either through magazines or by leafing through paperback racks, it was easy to introduce them to new writers. Now the situation is more difficult. One creative solution has been apostrophe series such as Tom Clancy's Op Center. Other people are credited with actually writing the books but the name above the title is there for branding purposes.
Which all leads us back to the original question: Why did thrillers become so dominant?
They tend to be easily marketable.
They are compatible with franchises.
They lend themselves to adaptation as big budget action movies.
Their somewhat impersonal style makes them suitable for ghosting or apostrophe branding.
They are, in short, they are what the market is looking for. As for me, I'm looking for the next reprint from Hard Case, but I might borrow the latest Turow after you're done with it.
* "Is that a spoiler?"
"No, sir. It was spoiled when I got here."
p.s. I was going to tie in with a branding situation Slim Jim snacks faced a few years ago but this post is running a bit long. Maybe I'll get back to it later.
The story so far: last week Andrew Gelman had a post on a book that discussed the dominance of best seller lists and suggested that it was due to their increased quality and respectability. I argued that the quality and respectability had if anything decreased (here), posted some background information (here and here) then discussed how the economics of publishing from the late Nineteenth Century through the Post-War era had influenced genre fiction. The following closes with a look at where we are now and how the current state of the market determines what we're seeing at the bookstore.
As the market shrank in the last part of the Twentieth Century, the pay scale shifted to the feast and (mostly) famine distribution of today. (The century also saw a similar shift for musicians, artists and actors.) Non-paying outlets sprang up. Fan fiction emerged (non-licensed use of characters had, of course, been around for years -- Tiajuana bibles being a classic example -- but fan fiction was written for the author's enjoyment without any real expectation of payment). These changes are generally blamed on the internet but the conventional wisdom is at least a couple of decades off. All of these trends were well established by the Seventies.
With the loss of the short story market and the consolidation of publishing, the economics of writing on spec became brutal. Writing and trying to sell a novel represents a tremendous investment of time and energy with little hope of success. By comparison writing on spec in the Forties meant coming up with twelve to fifteen pages then sending them off to twenty or so potential markets. The best of these markets paid good money; the worst were hungry for anything publishable.
The shift from short story to novel also meant greater risk for the publisher (and, though we don't normally think of it in these terms, for the reader who also invested money and time). A back-pages story that most readers skipped over might hurt the sales and reputation of a magazine slightly but as long as the featured stories were strong, the effect would be negligible. Novels though are free-standing and the novel gets that gets skipped over is the novel that goes unsold.
When Gold Medal signed John. D. MacDonald they knew were getting a skilled, prolific writer with a track record artistically and commercially successful short fiction. The same could be said about the signing of Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Joe Gores and many others. Publishing these first time authors was a remarkably low risk proposition.
Unfortunately for publishers today, there are no potential first time authors with those resumes. Publishers now have to roll the dice on inexperienced writers of unknown talent and productivity. In response to that change, they have taken various steps to mitigate the risk.
One response was the rise of the marketable blockbuster. The earliest example I can think of is the book Lace by Shirley Conran. If memory serves, Lace got a great deal of attention in the publishing world for Conran's huge advance, her lack of fiction-writing experience, and the role marketing played in the process. The general feeling was that the tagline ("Which one of you bitches is my mother? ") came first while the book itself was merely an afterthought.
More recently we have Dexter, a marketer's dream ("He's a serial killer who kills serial killers... It's torture porn you can feel good about!"). The author had a few books in his resume but nothing distinguished. The most notable was probably a collaboration with Star Trek actor Michael Dorn. The first book in the series, Darkly Dreaming Dexter was so poorly constructed that all of the principals had to act completely out of character to resolve the plot (tip for new authors: when a character casually overlooks her own attempted vivisection, it's time for a rewrite*).
The problems with the quality of the novel had no apparent effect on sales, nor did it prevent the character from appearing in a successful series of sequels and being picked up by Showtime (The TV show was handled by far more experienced writers who managed to seal up almost all of the plot holes).
The point here is not that Darkly Dreaming Dexter was a bad book or that publishing standards have declined. The point is that the economics have changed. Experienced fiction writers are more rare. Marketable concepts and franchises are more valuable, as is synergy with other media. The markets are smaller. There are fewer players. And much of the audience has a troublesome form of brand loyalty.
Normally of course brand loyalty is a plus, but books are an unusual case. If you convince a Coke drinker to also to drink Sprite you probably won't increase his overall soda consumption; you'll just have cannibalization. But readers who stick exclusively with one writer are severely underconsuming. Convince James Patterson readers to start reading Dean Koontz and you could double overall sales.
When most readers got their fiction either through magazines or by leafing through paperback racks, it was easy to introduce them to new writers. Now the situation is more difficult. One creative solution has been apostrophe series such as Tom Clancy's Op Center. Other people are credited with actually writing the books but the name above the title is there for branding purposes.
Which all leads us back to the original question: Why did thrillers become so dominant?
They tend to be easily marketable.
They are compatible with franchises.
They lend themselves to adaptation as big budget action movies.
Their somewhat impersonal style makes them suitable for ghosting or apostrophe branding.
They are, in short, they are what the market is looking for. As for me, I'm looking for the next reprint from Hard Case, but I might borrow the latest Turow after you're done with it.
* "Is that a spoiler?"
"No, sir. It was spoiled when I got here."
p.s. I was going to tie in with a branding situation Slim Jim snacks faced a few years ago but this post is running a bit long. Maybe I'll get back to it later.
Vanishing media
Brad Plummer shares the following examples of how ephemeral some of our art and images are:
It's also a perversion of the original intent of copyright laws. Copyrights like patents are government imposed monopolies that dampen commerce and development of new works. Intellectual property rights were seen, in the words of Jefferson, as a necessary evil to balance the interests of the creators with those of the general public by granting temporary these monopolies.
The suggestion that extending these monopolies for almost a century is meant to protect the interests of creators is absurd. The vast majority of these rights are held by companies like Disney or Time-Warner, companies that frequently screwed over the original creators and are now spending more money lobbying to keep the rights than they did to actually acquire them. This is particularly egregious for Disney, a company founded on adaptations of public domain works.
Actually, though, we don't even need to consider the apocalypse. The fragile state of digital storage is already causing trouble. NASA has a few people racing to recover old images from its Lunar Orbiter missions in the 1960s, which are currently stored on magnetic tapes and may not be long for this world. And the National Archives is struggling to preserve its digital records, which tend to rot faster than paper records.
A related tale of disintegrating media comes from Larry Lessig's Free Culture—though this one has a twist. There are a lot of films that were made after 1923 that have no commercial value anymore. They never made it to video or DVD; the reels are just collecting dust in vaults somewhere. In theory, it shouldn’t be too hard to digitize these films and put them in an archive. But alas, thanks to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that was passed by Congress in 1998, any film made after 1923 won't enter the public domain until at least 2019.
That means these films are still under copyright, and anyone who wanted to restore them would have to track down the copyright-holders (not always easy to do) and probably hire a lawyer. And who's going to go through that much trouble just to restore some obscure movie that only a few people might ever watch? Yet a lot of these older movies were produced on nitrate-based stock, and they'll have dissolved by the time 2019 rolls around, leaving nothing behind but canisters of dust. It's sort of tragic.
It's also a perversion of the original intent of copyright laws. Copyrights like patents are government imposed monopolies that dampen commerce and development of new works. Intellectual property rights were seen, in the words of Jefferson, as a necessary evil to balance the interests of the creators with those of the general public by granting temporary these monopolies.
The suggestion that extending these monopolies for almost a century is meant to protect the interests of creators is absurd. The vast majority of these rights are held by companies like Disney or Time-Warner, companies that frequently screwed over the original creators and are now spending more money lobbying to keep the rights than they did to actually acquire them. This is particularly egregious for Disney, a company founded on adaptations of public domain works.
Another outstanding (and tragic) economics story from This American Life
"A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: how it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons – until it was too late."
Currently available for a free download.
Currently available for a free download.
Let's talk about sex
More cool stuff from the New York Times' best science writer (not that the others have set the bar that high)
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
The real thing
Jaime Escalante dies at 79; math teacher who challenged East L.A. students to 'Stand and Deliver'
Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, died Tuesday. He was 79.
Jaime Escalante, the charismatic former East Los Angeles high school teacher who taught the nation that inner-city students could master subjects as demanding as calculus, died Tuesday. He was 79.
Today's pointer
I am on the road (trasporting 3 pets solo -- don't ask) so blooging is very light.
But John D Cook brought up an interesting point today that should not be missed. It's a grey area but it is worth being very careful about just how much effort there is involved trying to improve medical care and how many barriers need to be crossed.
It's a difficult balance!
But John D Cook brought up an interesting point today that should not be missed. It's a grey area but it is worth being very careful about just how much effort there is involved trying to improve medical care and how many barriers need to be crossed.
It's a difficult balance!
The Decline of the Middle (Creative) Class
I suggested in an earlier post that the rise to dominance of the thriller had not been accompanied by a rise in quality and reputation. In this and the next post, I'll try to put some foundations under this claim.
Popular art is driven by markets and shifts in popular art can always be traced back, at least partly, to economic, social and technological developments as well as changes in popular taste. The emergence of genre fiction followed the rise of the popular magazine (check here for more). Jazz hit its stride as the population started moving to cities. Talking pictures replaced silents when the technology made them possible.
Crime fiction, like science fiction first appeared in response to demand from general interest magazines like the Strand then moved into genre specific magazines like Black Mask and a few years later, cheap paperbacks. The demand for short stories was so great that even a successful author like Fitzgerald saw them as a lucrative alternative to novels. There was money to be made and that money brought in a lot of new writers.
It seems strange to say it now but for much of the Twentieth Century, it was possible to make a middle class living as a writer of short fiction. It wasn't easy; you had to write well and type fast enough to melt the keys but a surprisingly large number of people managed to do it.
Nor were writers the only example of the new creative middle class. According to Rosy McHargue (reported by music historian Brad Kay) in 1925 there were two hundred thousand professional musicians in the United States. Some were just scraping by, but many were making a good living. (keep in mind that many restaurants, most clubs and all theaters had at least one musician on the payroll.) Likewise, the large number of newspapers and independent publishers meant lots of work for graphic artists.
I don't want to wax too nostalgic for this era. Sturgeon's Law held firmly in place: 95% of what was published was crap. But it was the market for crap that made the system work. It provided the freelance equivalent of paid training -- writers could start at least partially supporting themselves while learning their craft, and it mitigated some of the risk of going into the profession -- even if you turned out not to be good enough you could still manage food and shelter while you were failing.
It was also a remarkably graduated system, one that rewarded quality while making room for the aforementioned crap. The better the stories the better the market and the higher the acceptance rate. In 1935, Robert E. Howard made over $2,000 strictly through magazine sales. Later, as the paperback market grew, writers at the very top like Ray Bradbury or John O'Hara would also see their stories collected in book form.
Starting with Gold Medal Books, paperback originals became a force in 1950. This did cut into the magazine market and hastened the demise of the pulps but it made it easier than ever before to become a novelist. It was more difficult (though still possible) to make a living simply by selling short stories, but easier to make the transition to longer and more lucrative works.
It was, in short, a beautifully functioning market with an almost ideal compensation system for a freelance based industry. It produced some exceptionally high quality products that have generated billions of dollars and continue to generate them in resales and adaptations (not to mention imitations and unlicensed remakes). This includes pretty much every piece of genre fiction you can think written before 1970.
The foundation of that system, the short story submarket, is essentially dead and the economics and business models of the rest of the publishing industry has changed radically leading to the rise of marketing, the blockbuster mentality and what I like to call the Slim Jim conundrum.
Tune in next time.
Popular art is driven by markets and shifts in popular art can always be traced back, at least partly, to economic, social and technological developments as well as changes in popular taste. The emergence of genre fiction followed the rise of the popular magazine (check here for more). Jazz hit its stride as the population started moving to cities. Talking pictures replaced silents when the technology made them possible.
Crime fiction, like science fiction first appeared in response to demand from general interest magazines like the Strand then moved into genre specific magazines like Black Mask and a few years later, cheap paperbacks. The demand for short stories was so great that even a successful author like Fitzgerald saw them as a lucrative alternative to novels. There was money to be made and that money brought in a lot of new writers.
It seems strange to say it now but for much of the Twentieth Century, it was possible to make a middle class living as a writer of short fiction. It wasn't easy; you had to write well and type fast enough to melt the keys but a surprisingly large number of people managed to do it.
Nor were writers the only example of the new creative middle class. According to Rosy McHargue (reported by music historian Brad Kay) in 1925 there were two hundred thousand professional musicians in the United States. Some were just scraping by, but many were making a good living. (keep in mind that many restaurants, most clubs and all theaters had at least one musician on the payroll.) Likewise, the large number of newspapers and independent publishers meant lots of work for graphic artists.
I don't want to wax too nostalgic for this era. Sturgeon's Law held firmly in place: 95% of what was published was crap. But it was the market for crap that made the system work. It provided the freelance equivalent of paid training -- writers could start at least partially supporting themselves while learning their craft, and it mitigated some of the risk of going into the profession -- even if you turned out not to be good enough you could still manage food and shelter while you were failing.
It was also a remarkably graduated system, one that rewarded quality while making room for the aforementioned crap. The better the stories the better the market and the higher the acceptance rate. In 1935, Robert E. Howard made over $2,000 strictly through magazine sales. Later, as the paperback market grew, writers at the very top like Ray Bradbury or John O'Hara would also see their stories collected in book form.
Starting with Gold Medal Books, paperback originals became a force in 1950. This did cut into the magazine market and hastened the demise of the pulps but it made it easier than ever before to become a novelist. It was more difficult (though still possible) to make a living simply by selling short stories, but easier to make the transition to longer and more lucrative works.
It was, in short, a beautifully functioning market with an almost ideal compensation system for a freelance based industry. It produced some exceptionally high quality products that have generated billions of dollars and continue to generate them in resales and adaptations (not to mention imitations and unlicensed remakes). This includes pretty much every piece of genre fiction you can think written before 1970.
The foundation of that system, the short story submarket, is essentially dead and the economics and business models of the rest of the publishing industry has changed radically leading to the rise of marketing, the blockbuster mentality and what I like to call the Slim Jim conundrum.
Tune in next time.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day wondering what a giant deodorant gun looks like
Thrillers on Economics -- a quick digression
I've been working on a series of posts about the economics of crime novels (see here and here) and it got me thinking about economics in crime novels. I'm no expert but here's my incomplete survey.
George Goodman (a.k.a. "Adam Smith") once bemoaned the absence of business in American literature with the notable exception of John P. Marquand. With all due respect to the estimable Marquand (himself no stranger to the pulps), Goodman might have found what he was looking for if he had spent less time in high-end bookstores and more time in his corner drugstore looking at the books with the lurid covers.
Of the many crime novels built around businesses, the best might be Murder Must Advertise, a Lord Whimsey by Dorothy L. Sayers. The story is set in a London ad agency in the Thirties, a time when the traditional roles of the aristocracy were changing and "public school lads" were showing up in traditional bourgeois fields like advertising.
Sayers had been a highly successful copywriter (variations on some of her campaigns are still running today) and has sometimes been credited with coining the phrase "It pays to advertise." All this success did not soften her view of the industry, a view which is probably best captured by Whimsey's observation that truth in advertising is like yeast in bread.
But even if Sayers holds the record for individual event, the lifetime achievement award has got to go to the man whom many* consider the best American crime novelist, John D. MacDonald.
Before trying his hand at writing, MacDonald had earned an MBA at Harvard and over his forty year writing career, business and economics remained a prominent part of his fictional universe (one supporting character in the Travis McGee series was an economist who lived on a boat called the John Maynard Keynes). But it was in some of the non-series books that MacDonald's background moved to the foreground.
Real estate frequently figured in MacDonald's plots (not that surprising given given their Florida/Redneck Riviera settings). His last book, Barrier Island, was built around a plan to work federal regulations and creative accounting to turn a profit from the cancellation of a wildly overvalued project. In Condominium, sleazy developers dodge environmental regulations and building codes (which turned out to be a particularly bad idea in a hurricane-prone area).
Real estate also figures MacDonald's examination of televangelism, One More Sunday, as does almost every aspect of an Oral Roberts scale enterprise, HR, security, public relations, lobbying, broadcasting and most importantly fund-raising. It's a complete, realistic, insightful picture. You can find companies launched with less detailed business plans.
But MacDonald's best book on business may be A Key to the Suite, a brief and exceedingly bitter account of a management consultant deciding the future of various executives at a sales convention. Suite was published as a Gold Medal Original paperback in 1962. You could find a surprising amount of social commentary in those drugstore book racks, usually packaged with lots of cleavage.
* One example of many:
“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.” - KURT VONNEGUT
George Goodman (a.k.a. "Adam Smith") once bemoaned the absence of business in American literature with the notable exception of John P. Marquand. With all due respect to the estimable Marquand (himself no stranger to the pulps), Goodman might have found what he was looking for if he had spent less time in high-end bookstores and more time in his corner drugstore looking at the books with the lurid covers.
Of the many crime novels built around businesses, the best might be Murder Must Advertise, a Lord Whimsey by Dorothy L. Sayers. The story is set in a London ad agency in the Thirties, a time when the traditional roles of the aristocracy were changing and "public school lads" were showing up in traditional bourgeois fields like advertising.
Sayers had been a highly successful copywriter (variations on some of her campaigns are still running today) and has sometimes been credited with coining the phrase "It pays to advertise." All this success did not soften her view of the industry, a view which is probably best captured by Whimsey's observation that truth in advertising is like yeast in bread.
But even if Sayers holds the record for individual event, the lifetime achievement award has got to go to the man whom many* consider the best American crime novelist, John D. MacDonald.
Before trying his hand at writing, MacDonald had earned an MBA at Harvard and over his forty year writing career, business and economics remained a prominent part of his fictional universe (one supporting character in the Travis McGee series was an economist who lived on a boat called the John Maynard Keynes). But it was in some of the non-series books that MacDonald's background moved to the foreground.
Real estate frequently figured in MacDonald's plots (not that surprising given given their Florida/Redneck Riviera settings). His last book, Barrier Island, was built around a plan to work federal regulations and creative accounting to turn a profit from the cancellation of a wildly overvalued project. In Condominium, sleazy developers dodge environmental regulations and building codes (which turned out to be a particularly bad idea in a hurricane-prone area).
Real estate also figures MacDonald's examination of televangelism, One More Sunday, as does almost every aspect of an Oral Roberts scale enterprise, HR, security, public relations, lobbying, broadcasting and most importantly fund-raising. It's a complete, realistic, insightful picture. You can find companies launched with less detailed business plans.
But MacDonald's best book on business may be A Key to the Suite, a brief and exceedingly bitter account of a management consultant deciding the future of various executives at a sales convention. Suite was published as a Gold Medal Original paperback in 1962. You could find a surprising amount of social commentary in those drugstore book racks, usually packaged with lots of cleavage.
* One example of many:
“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.” - KURT VONNEGUT
Sunday, March 28, 2010
All Cretans are ad execs
This ad reminded of the Liar's Paradox. Not exactly the same thing, but the juxtaposition of messages -- romanticized images of cars brainwash you into desiring hollow status symbols/look at the romanticized images of our cars -- certainly plays to the irony-impaired.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
My best subject used to be recess
David Elkind has a good op-ed piece out today on the loss of unstructured playtime in many schools.
The fundamental assumption of all educational debates needs to be that children are naturally curious and creative, that evolution has programmed them to learn and explore. Strategies that do a good job capitalizing on that curiosity and creativity will be successful and sometimes the best way to do that is to simply get out of the kids' way.
One consequence of these changes is the disappearance of what child-development experts call “the culture of childhood.” This culture, which is to be found all over the world, was best documented in its English-language form by the British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie in the 1950s. They cataloged the songs, riddles, jibes and incantations (“step on a crack, break your mother’s back”) that were passed on by oral tradition. Games like marbles, hopscotch and hide and seek date back hundreds of years. The children of each generation adapted these games to their own circumstances.I have some quibbles with the essay and strong objections to a couple of points but most of what Elkind has to say here is valid and important.Yet this culture has disappeared almost overnight, and not just in America. For example, in the 1970s a Japanese photographer, Keiki Haginoya, undertook what was to be a lifelong project to compile a photo documentary of children’s play on the streets of Tokyo. He gave up the project in 1996, noting that the spontaneous play and laughter that once filled the city’s streets, alleys and vacant lots had utterly vanished.
For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.
The fundamental assumption of all educational debates needs to be that children are naturally curious and creative, that evolution has programmed them to learn and explore. Strategies that do a good job capitalizing on that curiosity and creativity will be successful and sometimes the best way to do that is to simply get out of the kids' way.
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