by John Crace
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner (2005)
In the summer of 2003 the New York Times sent the journalist Stephen J Dubner to interview the heralded maverick economist Steven D Levitt. What were the chances of two men with extraneous initials being attracted to one another? Higher than you might think. Levitt recognised in Dubner a man with a gift for hagiography, while Dubner knew a meal ticket when he saw it.
Anyone living in the US in 1990 could have been forgiven for being scared out of his skin. Crime was expected to rocket out of control within a decade. What happened? It went down. Why? More police? No. It was because the abortion laws changed. All those who would have grown up to be criminals were never born.
Ever wondered why an estate agent sells her house for more than you? She’s better at her job? No. The extra $10,000 you might get is only worth about $150 to her. But when she sells her own house the full $10,000 extra is hers. See. It’s simple when you think about it.
Levitt is considered a demi-god, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science.
If morality is the way we would like the world to work, then economics is how it actually does work. Freakonomics works on a number of premises. 1) Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. 2) Conventional wisdom is often wrong. 3) Experts use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda. 4) Readers’ gullibility should never be underestimated.
Levitt is a noetic butterfly that no one has pinned down, but is claimed by all.
What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? They all cheat. I know this will come as a terrible shock but dreary data proves it is true.
Levitt is one of the most caring men in the universe.
Why do so many drug dealers live with their mom? Amazingly, I can prove that most of them earn far less than you might imagine.
Levitt is genial, low-key and unflappable.
What makes a perfect parent? Research has shown that making a child watch TV in a library is the most effective way of ensuring he gets top grades.
Levitt is about to revolutionise our understanding of black culture. Even for Levitt this is new turf.
Black parents often give their children different names. A boy called Deshawn is less likely to get a job interview than someone called Steven. Maybe Deshawn should change his name.
Digested read, digested: What is the probability that a collection of often trivial and obvious data will be passed off as brilliance? Regrettably high.
The Game
by Neil Strauss (2005)
There were five of us living in the Hollywood mansion. Mystery, Herbal, Papa, Playboy and me, Style. None of us used our real names, only the ones we had given ourselves. Irony was already taken, in case you’re wondering. So how did I get here?
I’m not attractive. I’m short and bald. You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned my personality. That’s because I don’t have one, which is why I had never had a girlfriend.
‘Listen,’ said my editor, placing a paper bag over my head, ‘I’ve heard about a group of male Pick Up Artists (PUAs) who claim they can get any woman they want just by following a set patter, and I reckoned that if it works for you …’
A week later I found myself in a master-class being run by Mystery. ‘First you approach the three set,’ he said. ‘You then remove the obstacles and neg the target. Play it right and you can close any woman you like.’
I practised relentlessly and turned out to be a natural. Within months I could sarge any bar and was giving classes myself. But success came at a price; it became tough hearing woman after woman saying, ‘You’re the best, Style’ and I longed for something more meaningful. So when I did make a deeper connection with Caroline, I videoed it to remind myself – and her – how sincere I could be.
My status within the PUA community was now legendary. I once heard someone use my lines to pick-up Paris Hilton and some people even started shaving their heads and sawing off their legs below the knee to look like me. It was all rather sad, really, as no one could have ever come close to matching my prime babemagnet quality – an overweening sense of self-regard.
I was concerned, though, that my fame might affect my day job as it became tiring listening to so many people negging me by claiming they had never heard of Neil Strauss, the world’s best writer. Luckily, the important people weren’t put off as Tom Cruise and Courtney Love demanded I should be the journalist to interview them. I like to think neither of them was disappointed on meeting me.
It was the moment for Project Hollywood: five guys, surrounded by an endless stream of perfect 10 babes, living the PUA dream. And yet sometimes, when I was watching myself in the mirror having sex with two porn stars at the same time, I wondered whether there might be life outside my ego.
Please don’t get the wrong idea about me. People think that PUAs are predators; but I’m actually an Averagely Frustrated Chump (AFC). I love women – especially women who are a bit stoned or pissed – but I am in fear of them so I have to turn myself into something they want. And if you believe that, you’re probably the sort of babe who falls for my patter in bars.
Eventually it all had to come to an end. Project Hollywood fell apart and I met Lisa. She was my one-itis – the woman on whom I had used all my best moves to hypnotise into thinking she had fallen in love with me. This was a relationship we both knew would last for ever.
Digested read, digested: The American wet dream.
The Architecture of Happiness
by Alain de Botton (2006)
1. A grimy terraced house. Not mine, I might add, but one I have driven past. Quickly. Inside, we find peeling wallpaper, stained carpets and Ikea furniture, yet somehow people may have found happiness in such squalor.
2. The Greek philosopher Epictetus is said to have chastised a friend for venerating his surroundings, but attempts to scorn the material world have always been matched by attempts to mould it to graceful ends. Yet buildings fall down and moods change, so how can we define the meaning of architectural beauty? We probably can’t, but that is not going to get in the way of my trademark cod-philosophical posturing.
3. There was once a clear idea of what was beautiful. The Classical tradition was revered for many centuries and palaces were built in renaissance Italy that would not have been unfamiliar to Marcus Aurelius. According to Wikipedia, things changed in 1747 when Horace Walpole sparked the gothic revival, and since then the advance of technology has seen a growing eclecticism of ideas. How lucky you are to have me to point these things out.
4. The Modernist tradition, inspired by Le Corbusier, flirted uneasily with science and functionalism. For instance, you might think that numbering my paragraphs was both scientific and functional: it isn’t. It’s just pretentious.
5. If engineering cannot tell us what is beautiful, how do we escape the sterile relativism, which suggests that to label one building more aesthetically pleasing is to be undemocratic? By lapsing into an equally sterile relativistic debate about cultural and moral values contingent on architecture.
6. Buildings and objects can convey meaning with a single line or an elaborate flourish. They are the repository of ideas and ideals. I once walked from McDonald’s in Victoria to Westminster Cathedral, a journey of only a few yards for ordinary people but a marathon expedition into the soul for someone of my sensitivity and intellect.
7. I seem to be running out of things to say, so let me talk about art for a while. Who cannot admire the sadness in a painting by Pieter de Hooch without coming close to tears? You may feel your eyes welling up as you read; these, though, are tears of boredom.
8. A beautiful building, as Prince Charles once opined, is a transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium. Whatever love is. It is, however, in Friedrich Schiller that we find the clearest elucidation of the ways in which the finest architecture can embody our collective memory an
d idealised potential.
9. We note, though, that ideals of beauty change over time. This should not stop us making sweeping generalisations. Great architecture has a natural sense of order, one that mirrors the natural world where I am at the top and you are much further down. I was once recovering from too much thinking in an expensive hotel that was done-up in the neo-renaissance style found in Amsterdam and was perplexed to find myself overwhelmed with anomie. Then I remembered I was in Japan.
10. How can we escape the notion that someone called Derek, Malcolm or Prescott will despoil a green field with box-like structures for the lower orders? By owning your own country estate.
Digested read, digested: The literature of pretention.
Small Dogs Can Save Your Life
by Bel Mooney (2010)
I was sitting in my study, wondering whether I would ever write a book again, when my little dog Bonnie leapt on to my lap and said: ‘Oh Bel! / As far as I can tell / You’ve been through hell.’ I ruffled her fur playfully as a solitary tear welled. ‘You’ve been my rock in my painful separation from J, the cleverest man in the universe,’ I replied. Bonnie looked me in the eyes. ‘Then milk it, you dozy fool. Everyone knows J is Jonathan Dimbleby and at least one publisher must be interested. Even if you do write like a pretentiously overwrought Jilly Cooper.’
Bonnie came unto us one January morning when the pale sun glimmered milkily over the icy Somerset fields. I looked up from Creative Writing for Beginners and noticed a tiny dog tied to a tree. ‘You’ve come to save me, Bonnie,’ I said, for I instinctively knew her name. ‘Yup,’ Bonnie yapped. ‘But first I could do with a piss.’
J and I welcomed Bonnie into the warmth of our immensely successful media lifestyle and she was feted throughout Bath as she strolled through that splendid Georgian town in her Nicole Farhi jacket while reading Jane Austen. The summer of 2002 was the happiest time of my life. J and I had been blissfully married for 35 years and I had never stopped being grateful that this impossibly brilliant man had plucked me from my humble origins and allowed me to blossom into one of the finest writers ever to fill a newspaper column. I was lost in the newness of the Truth.
Then tragedy. J met the soprano Susan Chilcott. It was a coup de foudre. He returned to our farmhouse with a first edition of Middlemarch. ‘I shall always love you and don’t want a divorce and all that, Bel,’ he said. ‘But Susan and I are in love.’ I understood his needs, so Bonnie and I packed our bags for a B&B.
Friends have expressed surprise that I never hated Susan, but who was I – a latter day saint and seer – to deny another woman the love of the world’s most charismatic man? And even when she so tragically died a few months later, I could only feel the pain of a great love lost. Besides, I still had Bonnie. ‘Let’s go shopping to cheer ourselves up,’ she would say, as I wrestled with the gravity of Dante and Botox. ‘Why don’t you buy me that lovely Swarovski crystal collar?’
I was also helped by my immensely successful and influential friends on national papers who offered to send me on expensive holidays to all parts of the world for their travel sections, along with my great friend Robin, a photographer who is somewhat younger than me. We became very close, and though Robin must have understood he will never be as important to me as either J or Bonnie, he asked me to marry him.
My acceptance had nothing to do with the phone call from J the previous day. ‘I still love you and all that, Bel,’ he had said. ‘But I’ve met this great bird in her 20s and I need a divorce.’ How angry I get when people criticise J for having a mid-life! Don’t they understand the desires of the Great? Though it was jolly nice to be invited to the wedding of my best friends Prince Charles and Camilla. How wonderful to see a man happy with a woman his own age!
And so my life moved on. How I teetered with indecision when the Daily Mail offered me 10 times the money The Times was paying for my agony aunt column! Again, Bonnie came to the rescue. ‘Take the cash, you moron. I need a pedicure.’ So I did and I have never looked back, even when Bonnie had a splinter in her paw and I thought she might die. Fortunately my immense self-knowledge and the words of Kahlil Gibran were a comfort.
Through this time of personal growth I have emerged a stronger person. I know the love J and I have for one another was just too strong for us to stay together, so, as I anxiously await his texts, I happily lie in bed with Bonnie, while Robin curls up in his basket on the floor.
Digested read, digested: Get out while you still can, Bonnie.
I Can Make You Happy
by Paul McKenna (2011)
I am extremely disappointed to find out that after I have made you thin, made you rich, mended your broken heart, changed your life in seven days, given you instant confidence and guaranteed you success in 90 days in my previous books, you are all still as miserable as sin. I only hope you read this book a little more carefully than you have the others. For those who have difficulty reading, I have included a CD; don’t worry if you do not have a machine to play it on. Just close your eyes and imagine a CD player in front of you. Now reach down and take it. Easy.
If you have bought this book, you have made a great start to a world of infinite happiness. How do I know this? Because you must be incredibly suggestible to imagine I can make you happy and therefore if I tell you I am making you happy you will probably believe it. If you don’t believe this, let’s start with me. One of the reasons I am so happy is because you have paid £10.99 for this book. That’s right. Each one of you has made me happy, so allow yourself to be happy that you have made me happy. I understand that some of you may be feeling depressed and saying to yourselves, ‘Paul is a charlatan’; let me reassure you that scientists have been amazed at how many people I have cured of long-term depression by getting them to press the second and fourth fingers of their left hand against their nose while reciting, ‘Paul is Prozac’.
One final thing before we start in earnest. My method works. If you are still feeling unhappy at the end, then I can guarantee you will be feeling less unhappy than if you hadn’t read it. And if you really do still feel utterly fed up, then it’s because you haven’t done everything I suggested, so it’s your fault and you deserve every bit of misery coming your way.
OK, let’s move on to the practical side. Start by answering this question: on a scale of 1–10, where 1 is suicidal, how low do you feel? If you score between 1 and 3, go straight to the next chapter for five simple steps that will give you an instant pick-me-up. First read some pages with a Zen-like blue tinge round the edges, then stand up straight, stop feeling sorry for yourself, tap your collarbone five times while looking up and down very quickly 13 times and then step forward into an imaginary new you.
There. I can already sense your score has rocketed to 5 or 6, and you are ready to move on to more advanced happiness studies. Happiness is a habit; it isn’t something that comes with new clothes. It’s something you have to work at. So start smiling and get out and take some exercise. No one can expect to be happy if they are a bit chubby.
Now imagine some happy dots in front of you and try to join them up. Start giving yourself positive messages. It’s hard to be up if you are telling yourself no one likes you; train yourself to say, ‘No one likes me but I don’t care because I don’t like anyone anyway.’
Now we’re making progress. Next, you have to learn how to make your happiness permanent. Take time out each day to think of all the things you want to achieve. Now measure up the upsides and the downsides. Suppose there’s a girl you would like to date. How would your feelings score if she said no – 3? And if she said yes – 10? So it clearly makes sense to harass as many women as possible until one says yes.
There will still be some negative things in your life that are hard to throw off, but you can diminish their power by turning them from colour to black and white in your mind and then flushing them down the toilet. Trust me. You can always achieve more than you think. A friend of mine was desperate to be an artist, so he dumped his wife and k
ids and is now really happy living in Paris.
If you sincerely find that none of this is working, it may be that your emotions are blocked. Ordinarily, this might take you many years of intensive therapy to overcome, but I can get you through it in just 20 minutes. See all that anger and guilt? Just let go of them. Whoosh. They’ve gone. Now you’re ready to find the deepest levels of inner happiness and bliss usually known only to Zen masters. Start by looking up my arse.
Digested read, digested: I can make you gullible.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
by Amy Chua (2011)
A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. Well, I can tell them, because I’ve done it. You don’t allow them to have any friends, you stop them from playing sport or watching TV and you waterboard them if they get less than an A* in every subject.
Sophia is our first born. At three months old, I left her for days on her own to learn Poincaré’s conjecture while I rewrote the US constitution, and by the time she was three she could speak seven languages, play Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto and had never so much as smiled. She was the ideal Chinese Tiger Mother’s daughter.
My second child, Lulu, was more of a handful. Even though she, too, was far more talented than the second-rate children of decadent American parents, she tried to resist my will at every turn. At the age of two, she refused to do more than 10 hours of maths homework a night and deliberately played wrong notes in the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. The only thing that worked was to wire electrodes to her hands.
There was a third child, Tiananmen. He was even more wilful and used to get out of his pram and stand defiantly in Times Square. Regrettably, I had to crush him with a tank. His death was not wholly in vain: Sophia and Lulu gave me a lot less trouble after that.