One of the most ignorant books I've read

This is a review of Ellen Ruppel Shell's book, 'Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture." Using 'cheap' as an insult proves nothing so much as the speaker's class prejudices. This book falls into that same trap. In an attempt to imitate objective journalism, the book contains many true narratives and well-documented facts. Then, on top of those facts, we are given a list of the author's opinions. There is little attempt to convince the reader that one follows from the other, and, often, the facts and the opinion don't seem even theoretically related.

For instance, her section on Ikea makes some valid points. Although Ikea says its wood is sustainably harvested, they haven't proved it; some people find Ikea furniture hard to assemble (although I think it's fun); and Ikea stores are big and sparsely located, so people have to drive farther to get to them. Then, without warning, she concludes the section with this:

Flatpacks of medium-density fiberboard hauled out of sprawling warehouses and cobbled together with IKEA's notorious L-shaped, six-sided Allen wrench are not tasteful, comfortable furniture. They are a facsimile of tasteful, comfortable, furniture.

None of this has come out of what she wrote before. I could excuse the woman's bias if she would at least be precise about what she objects to. What has the 'notorious' Allen key done to her? It seems like a pretty useful tool to me.. Or is it the flatpack or the size of the warehouse that we should hate? An example of the power of rhetoric to describe perfectly neutral things in terms that repel. And the question of how people can think they are comfortable in a chair, while Shell knows they are not actually comfortable, is a little beyond me.

Shell doesn't understand class:

Even for a book on the subject of material things, the author is materialistic. The word 'cheap' is used solely to disparage. The implication is that people who buy cheap goods are selfish, careless or at least short-sighted. Never once does the author recognize that we might not be choosing between 'cheap' goods and quality goods, but between 'cheap' goods and nothing. She consistently equates brand with quality, and appears to think it is morally wrong for a brand to produce a cheaper version of itself, because it betrays the 'trust' she has in brands. Outlet stores, where poor people can buy the same brands rich people do, are morally suspect for this reason.

A philosopher might question whether a Coach bag of questionable quality hawked by clerks who do not know the provenance of their merchandise is the Coach bag of our dreams...the uncoupling of brand name and product can't help but confuse us and, over time, even undermine our trust.

Dear God, imagine people losing faith in Coach! Actually, a person who trusts in a brand deserves to be disappointed--and incidentally, a philosopher would not be dreaming about a handbag. And if the people who shop at discount stores are content with the prestige value of their 'Coach' bags, why should the author take it upon herself to tell them they should find their purchases worthless? Buying a knockoff makes a lot more economic sense for most of us than paying full price. People who buy Coach bags don't care about the quality of the stitching. Does the author really think a handbag that costs $800 is 40 times better than the $20 one? Price may be an indicator of quality sometimes, but not here.

She doesn't understand history:

In Adam Smith's England, she thinks, people of every class bought high-quality products for a fair price. And because people knew the merchants from whom they bought, the merchants never exploited their customers. "You can only cheat your neighbor once." So, no grocer ever adulterated his merchandise, no innkeeper ever added fraudulent charges to his bill, no worker ever absconded with his wages. People were honest and good. All that changed because of international corporations and globalization.

Shoddy clothes, unreliable electronics, wobbly furniture, and questionable food have become the norm...The combination of quality and value, once available to the many, is now affordable only to the few.

Is this idealism, or just stupidity? First of all, there _were_ cities in the 18th century, London, for one, so people weren't always buying from their neighbors. And even in villages, people in the past didn't "buy local" in order to make a political statement--they had no other choice. And when you're buying local because transportation and communication over long distances are prohibitively expensive and take forever, you have no choice but to continue buying from your neighbor. Even if he puts vinegar in his wine or plaster of Paris in his bread (both formerly common practices). Anyone who has read a single 18th century novel or history knows that dishonesty, then as now, existed wherever dishonest people did.

And definitely doesn't understand economics:

She appears ignorant of the basic idea of comparative advantage:

Haiti once exported rice. Today [after a tariff reduction], three-quarters of the rice on Haitian dinner plates comes from the United States. Paying for imported food requires cash, and acquiring that cash usually means getting a job providing the First World with something it wants--either raw materials, such as timber, minerals, or coffee, or cheap mass-manufactured goods.

Yes. That's how it works. This is an example of the author writing so as to suggest that what she describes is bad--avoiding the trouble of actually giving a reason why it's bad. She seems to think buying food when you once produced it is an unqualified evil. So farmers are a priori better off than factory workers. Also, local food is a priori better than imported food, and when business provides cheap imported food which poor people can buy, this is bad, and governments should step in:

Rather than flooding markets in developing countries with cheap food, thereby weakening incentives to grow and process food locally, aid should be given directly to the poor to help them purchase food at fair prices.

She also thinks Americans, unlike every other people in history, are incapable of developing new skills in response to changes in economic incentives:

The idea that more and more Americans can reinvent themselves into ever more challenging work is a pipe dream.

I am glad I read the book, although I wish I had stopped with the sociology and skipped the opinions. There are several interesting bits--for instance, I didn't realize that a store's setting one price for everyone was, at one time, a revolutionary move. A interesting aside is that printing coupons or offering rebates is really a way of offering two prices--the person who is sensitive about spending money will clip the coupon, and buy your product--the person who cares less, or is less organized, will have his attention drawn to your product, and buy it without bothering to redeem the coupon.

But, my God, this is one of the most ignorant books I've ever read. And yet I have seen no critical reviews of it. The quality of the author's mind or scholarship doesn't seem to matter so much as the fact that the conclusions she comes to sound progressive and plausible--and support the rich, liberal belief that virtue can be attained by shopping at upper-class-coded stores rather than other stores.

I think sometimes in political discussions, there's a tendency to think that everyone who disagrees with you is evil or ignorant.

Beneath the din is a simple premise: if the other side knew the facts, if the other side really understood what was at stake, they would all surely agree. But they disagree, thus, they must not understand. Or they must be crazy.

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14257491&CFID=2742886&CFTOKEN=75016751

Maybe we would have more productive discussions if we could accept that, just as we've all had different childhoods, we all have different personalities and therefore different opinions.

A hilarious article from Nerve--they have such realistic female characters!

"I like you," he said. "I wanna take things slowly."

Take . . . things . . . slowly.

Was this some French phrase I wasn't familiar with? It sounded like English, but what did it mean?

On teenagers

A Salon article on parents dealing with their ‘delinquent’ children. What happens if your child is not the kind of person you envisioned?

("She's a bad girl," writes Lara. "And I made her. If a factory is judged by its product, I'm a bad mother.")

Both mother and daughter love each other and hate each other in equal measure. Both are prone to fits of drama and exaggeration. As a reader, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sift out a true and accurate account of what actually happened during the teen years of these girls. But truth and accuracy, in these books, are nearly beside the point. It's more interesting to look at what these mothers think happened to their daughters than it is to concern oneself with whether they are correct.

As a teenager, Martha Tod Dudman had sex, smoked pot, dropped acid, was not allowed to graduate with her class at the prestigious Madeira School and ran away to live in a Tenderloin tenement in San Francisco at age 17.

Dudman's daughter, Augusta, wears her mother's hippie clothes from the '60s, smokes pot and does acid. To Dudman, Augusta's pot smoking is different from her own: "I know it's not the gentle grass of the sixties. They treat it with something now, don't they? It's powerful." When Dudman's ex-husband tells her that he believes their daughter when she says that she finds drinking disgusting and has only smoked pot once or twice, Dudman thinks, "With the drugs, she had to have lots of them. Had to have every kind. Had to take everything. If she could have, she would have smoked fifteen cigarettes at once. I know because I was like that, too."

Dudman eventually decides to ship Augusta off to a wilderness treatment program in Oregon. It's hard to say whether this makes the situation better or worse. Augusta is so miserable that she slashes her wrists in the first few weeks. And when she gets the chance, Augusta busts out of the treatment center and, like her mother before her, runs away to San Francisco. (This really sends Dudman over the edge: She and another parent send both the FBI and a hired thug to hunt down their daughters and bring them back into captivity.)

This is fairly typical parental behavior. No one ever pauses to think that her children might have human rights.


Just like Sherlock Holmes, observation follows from hypothesis rather than the other way around. If you’re convinced there’s something wrong with your child, then the slightest foibles (watching too much TV, swearing, staying out late) become serious problems. If you were a little less quick to condemn your child, these things would never lead you to kidnap and imprison her. I think it all stems ultimately from a parent’s lack of self-love...

Perhaps the biggest obstacle that teens face is the fact that every parent was once a teen. And the memories these parents have of their own adolescence make it virtually impossible for them to see the teenagers in front of them.

Michael Pollan on food

Another article by Michael Pollan. He is a fanatic--a sympathetic one, but a fanatic. For instance, he thinks the healthcare crisis exists because people eat the wrong foods. Is that true? Personally, all the health care I’ve consumed has been either preventive care or antibiotics I took for communicable diseases (which I got because I went to institutional schools.) I, like most people, never became obese or diabetic because of my diet. Most health care costs come from basic preventive medicine or from the normal diseases of old age (including cancer, heart disease, etc.).

Also, Pollan’s description of food costs is filled with vagueries and inaccuracies.

Organic food is not subsidized in any way.

However you feel about free trade with regard to your computer or your car, my guess is that, if you thought about it, you'd feel differently about your food.

As if our feelings were relevant!

When he directly confronts food costs, he becomes harsh and judgmental:

I think people just have to dig down in their pockets and spend more for food. We seem to be able to afford spending $50 to $100 a month on television and cellphones.

Note the air of condescension here; a phone is a frivolity (although when I was trying to find a job, it sure seemed like a necessity!), while paying three times the normal price for eggs, as Pollan advises, is a rational decision.

I do have a certain sympathy for those who think we should be buying better food--but why don’t they devote their energy towards making better food affordable? As long as ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ foods are harder to find, spoil faster, and cost $6 for a loaf of bread or a carton of eggs, only relatively rich people will buy them. As it is now, telling poor people to spend more money than they have to on food is worthy of Marie Antoinette.

Sherlock Holmes was wrong

I just got around to reading Pierre Bayard’s 2008 book, Why Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong. (Bayard, the author of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, is a Freudian famous for injecting epistemology into literary criticism, with a special interest in middlebrow mystery fiction.)

Bayard’s entire style is a bit nonplussing. If you take things too seriously, reading him will just be frustrating. He is a fundamental skeptic--and we’re not used to applying skepticism to works of fiction. Bayard does not believe that the text is static...

Many elements presented to us in a text as established truths are actually, when looked at, carefully, only eyewitness accounts.

This skepticism allows him to look at the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles from outside, like any other testimony which needs to be weighed and judged. (N.B.: most of this will not much sense unless you have read the book.)

He asks, why does Sherlock Holmes fail so often? His method, observation leading to deduction leading to further observation, would seem scientific--but we are continually shown his mistakes and hurried misjudgements. But on what does deduction depend? On clues--which are what? Observed phenomena which someone deems significant. Upon the definition of a ‘clue’ hinges every one of Holmes’ cases. For instance, in “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, the detective’s investigation is set off by one man’s unverified observation of a set of pawprints. (Even on the tenth reading, I always find myself slightly suspicious of Dr. Mortimer.) Based on that single ‘clue’, Holmes forms a hypothesis.

The detective’s hypothesis rests on a figure (that of the murderer with the dog) and a motive (that of financial interest). Note that this construction eliminates other hypotheses, for instance the police’s hypothesis of accident, and that of a murder committed in a different way or for a different motive.

This hypothesis then guides Holmes to value certain observations as ‘clues’ and devalue others. The hound is perceived as dangerous, although it is never seen attacking anyone until Holmes and Watson shoot it. Selden’s death is perceived as a murder, although there is no evidence the dog or the murderer was present--and even Holmes admits that he and Watson have

...only surmise and conjecture. We should be laughed out of court if we came with such a story and such evidence.

We should also consider the absurdity of using a dog as a murder weapon in an attempt to frighten Sir Charles to death. What if it hadn’t worked on the first try?

How would Stapleton, if he had been seen, justify his presence on the moor in the company of a giant dog coated with phosphorus?

It’s also odd that Stapleton is absent from the climactic scene.

Bayard comes up with a new hypothesis. Stapleton owns the dog, which is harmless, simply because he finds it fun to scare people and likes to be left alone. Sir Charles’s and Selden’s deaths were both accidents. Beryl Stapleton was the one who encouraged Dr Mortimer’s suspicions, attracted Holmes’s attention in London, and ultimately created the figure of the murder with the dog. All of this was her way of getting rid of her husband, so that she could marry Sir Henry, kill him, and inherit his fortune!

There are several glaring holes in this hypothesis, though. The phosphorus painted around the dog’s eyes and mouth is explained as a means of keeping track of the dog in the dark. But then why only paint its face, rather than striping its body with paint? Not to mention the bizarrerie of keeping a mythical hound in the first place.

More importantly, we are told that Beryl changed around the signs which marked a safe path through the marsh, then told her husband that his dog had gotten loose and run into the marsh. Stapleton ran after it, got lost in the dark, and drowned.

A murder without a weapon, without a threat, without an insult, where the victim puts himself to death while the other characters applaud--it would be hard to find a finer triumph in the annals of crime.

But if it was that easy, why wasn’t that enough? Why involve Holmes, Mortimer and Sir Charles at all? We are repeatedly told that it’s easy to get lost and drown in the marsh, so I see no reason the police would have suspected Stapleton’s death wasn’t an accident. Of course, if Beryl was planning to carry out the same plan with Sir Henry, it might look more suspicious the second time around. But Beryl’s plan is supposed to begin before Mortimer consults Holmes--several weeks before Sir Henry comes to Baskerville, when no one has seen him or knows anything about him.

In a larger sense, Bayard’s method raises the question of the relationship between fiction and nonfiction.

From my perspective, everything I read or hear which I cannot myself confirm from experience falls into the same category. This is hinted at when we see old-timey novels describe themselves as ‘histories’. (Tom Jones, Don Quixote, Charles XII of Sweden and Julius Caesar all get ‘histories’.) ‘Nonfiction’ histories and ‘fictional’ novels are both unverifiable descriptions of past events. And my perception of their plausibility or lack thereof is not correlated with my belief in their ‘truth’. For instance, I find both the story of Watergate and that of “Pride and Prejudice” quite credible--on the other hand, the story of Auschwitz and that of “Bleak House” are both incredible. But I describe only the first and third as ‘nonfiction’, because other people have told me to do so.

Bayard refuses to draw a clear line between the two.

Language does not allow us to make a separation between real beings and imaginary characters, and so the integration of characters into reality is inevitable, whether one has an open mind or not.

Although wouldn’t it be cool if it did! A propos, I’ve always been intrigued by the French ‘journalistic’ use of the conditional, where

The president would have (aurait) planned to fake the moon landing...

means the president is alleged to, is thought to, or has apparently planned to fake it.

It’s incredible that by changing the grammar of a sentence and nothing else, the certainty of the sentence is undermined.