In any event, and in roughly chronological order:

1. Clive James, Visions Before Midnight or The Crystal Bucket. His TV criticism. I think I read one or other these when I was twelve or thirteen, having bought them on holidays somewhere. Not exactly Leavis or Empson, I know. But it taught me a lot about how to write, encouraged me to pretend I knew about the literary stuff James habitually referred to in passing, and I’m pretty sure helped make me an insufferable teenaged shit.

2. Steven Vogel, Life’s Devices. Another random bookshop discovery. This is a book about biomechanics but also, and more importantly, a terrific introduction to what is means to do science. A lot of it went past me when I read it first, but it was still irresistible in part because (as I remember) it’s written with this quiet wit right the way through. Chock full of trivia that isn’t really trivia. Strangely enough, I think Vogel still teaches here at Duke. I should thank him personally for writing such a great book.

3. Bernd Heinrich, Ravens in Winter. Another book by a biologist. (Are you seeing my imagined career path here?) Another classic book on the practice of science. Heinrich follows ravens around in Vermont, trying to figure out why the hell they would share carrion they find. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

4. Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior. So clever, so unassuming, so it made me want to be an economist. Then I took some economics and it wasn’t much like Schelling at all.

5. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. I think this book made me want to do sociology. Bluntly creative. Briskly suggestive. Deeply frustrating.

6. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. I don’t know a damn thing about medieval German history, but I had to read this book very, slowly, carefully and repeatedly as part of a Sociology of Community course as a third year undergraduate. I learned a tremendous amount in the process. The cases are fascinating: a girl branded as a witch, a man who refused to say his prayers, the ritual burial of a bull at a crossroads. The analysis is subtle: Sabean is excellent on the fine grain of relations between the State and the peasantry, and how religion and cultural meaning generally express these relations. But for me it was the first academic monograph I really grasped and, in the process, came to understand how hard it must be to write a book that good.

7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. I had to read chunks of it as a postgrad in Ireland, and as my reaction was one of constant irritation at Bourdieu’s writing style coupled with the feeling that he was getting at something important. I reread the first few chapters recently and was struck by how direct (and properly documented) its engagement with the literature was in comparison with much of the rest of his work, so I guess professional socialization has had its effect on me. But I was also surprised that it was as compelling as I remembered.

8. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve. This came out the year before I moved to the U.S. for graduate school. The book and the ensuing controversy around it taught me a lot about American academia, the wider world of the chattering classes in the U.S., the institutional structure that supported them, and the American public sphere generally. It wasn’t a pleasant lesson. As a piece of social science the book was terribly executed and written in transparently bad faith; the social sciences in general and sociology in particular botched their response; the pressure of media narratives flattened people into parodies of themselves; and many people who I’d thought might have known better turned out to have a healthy appetite for eugenic tripe, as long as it was presented more in sorrow than in anger.

9. William S. Cleveland, Visualizing Data. “This book presents a set of graphical methods for displaying data”. Does it ever. Tufte gets the Presidential Commissions and the high media profile, and deserves all that, but Cleveland shows you how it’s done in practice and wrote the software that lets you code it yourself. For me it opened up the world of serious thinking on data and model visualization for quantitative data.

10. Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship. Reading this wasn’t a transformative experience in some existential sense, but it obviously left a mark seeing as I ended up writing a dissertation and a book that revisited its main questions.

First and foremost, it is a terrible evil for a wife to sit forlorn at one of her several homes, severed from her husband, always hearing many malignant rumors, and for one messenger after another to come bearing tidings of disaster, each worse than the last, and cry them to the household. Because of such malignant tales as these, many times others have had to loose the high-hung halter from my neck, held in its strong grip. It is for this reason, in fact, that our boy, Timmy, does not stand here beside me, as he should. For he is in the protecting care of well-intentioned taxpayers, who warned me of trouble on two scores—your own peril beneath Ilium’s walls, and then the chance that the people in clamorous revolt might nationalize everything, as it is natural for men to trample all the more upon the fallen. Truly such an excuse supports no guile.

CASSANDRA
Are you sure you should be paying out this money?

CLYTAEMNESTRA
Thanks to a substantial injection of public funds, my heart is freed from its anxiety and the annual bonuses may be paid. [To AIGAMEMNON] So, my dear lord, dismount from your car, but do not set on common earth the foot that has trampled upon global markets. You to whom I have assigned the task to strew with bonuses, salary top-offs and the like, Quick! With something on the order of $160 million let his path be strewn, that Justice may usher him into a new quarter he never should have seen. The rest my unslumbering vigilance shall order duly, for if Geithner can be made to swallow this then, please god, pretty much fucking anything can be subsequently ordained.

AIGAMEMNON
Offspring of Leda, guardian of my house, your speech fits well with my views. Pamper me not as if I were a woman, nor, like some barbarian. For I do not take these gifts out of greed, but rather because my hands are tied with the bonds of contractual obligation. I find it difficult and distasteful to proceed in this fashion. But the gods of Serious Legal Consequences must be appeased and so unhappily I must shoulder the burden of paying out this money to employees who only recently crashed the global financial system.

CASSANDRA
Normally it’s the other way around, but I don’t believe this.

AIGAMEMNON
We honor the market thus; but it is not possible for a mortal to proceed with such barefaced cheek without fear. Thus I tell you it is better to revere me as a god. Only when man’s life comes to its end in taxpayer-funded, wholly unjustified prosperity dare we pronounce him happy; and if I may act in all things as I do now, and roll the Treasury in this quite spectacular fashion, I have good confidence that future creative restructuring solutions will likely eventuate similar outcomes. To have it turn out otherwise would be tantamount to Class Warfare. Besides, we are committed to seeking other ways to repay the taxpayers for supporting the Financial Products Division Retention Payments.

CASSANDRA
Such as what?

AIGAMEMNON
I was thinking maybe placing excrement in the trashcan of every citizen and setting it on fire on their doorstep.

CLYTAEMNESTRA
What do you suppose that Priam would have done, if he had achieved your triumph?

AIGAMEMNON
He would have gone with the flaming poop at the outset, I certainly believe.

CLYTAEMNESTRA
Then do not be be ashamed of mortal reproach.

AIGAMEMNON
And yet a people’s voice is a mighty power.

CASSANDRA
To be honest, I’m beginning to doubt it.

Like Daniel, I’ll admit that it might not be possible to answer my question, since measurement is next to impossible and I can think up of at least as many counterexamples as positive cases. But let’s not let that get in the way. The distinguishing factor here is that in recent memory, political leaders on the left do not boil complex situations down to almost mindlessly simple alternatives. The same cannot be said about political leaders on the right—- see George Bush, George Bush and, um, George Bush. This blind shoehorning of complex questions into the procrustean bed of goodies vs baddies has the peculiar stink of self-righteousness that renders some on the right unable to distinguish informed analysis from high treason. In contrast, those on the left are pretty good at acknowledging that, at least in principle, political choices may come with more than two options.

Why is this the case? I just made up two possible explanations:

1) The right takes things personally. When you have a political disagreement with someone on the left side of the spectrum, the tendency is to have a good fight and then maybe think about collecting some data. When you have a political disagreement with someone on the right side of the spectrum, the tendency is for that person to believe that the disagreement is an indication of a deep character flaw, such as the inability to reason, or distinguish good from evil. More (admittedly laughable) proof: run a Google search on “evil” and “liberal” and you get 426,000 hits; do the same with “conservative” and you only get 380,000 hits. [Hey, I did the same thing with “left-wing” and “right-wing” and the right-wingers had more hits, 135,000 to 55,000—ed. OK, but do the same thing with “Democrat” and “Ankle-Biter” and the Democrats win by a massive, 102,000 to 4,800. QED.]

2) Conservatives have yet to adjust to the fact that they’ve graduated from high-school. Until recently, high-schools were thought to be centers of unhappiness for people who should be popular but are not, because they can’t throw a football and have a subscription to The National Review. This was certainly the case when I was in school. Anyway, those who form their political positions in a climate of adolescent moral absolutes are not used to thinking about the complex world beyond the debate team, and as a result are not likely to pay attention to it later in life. Conservatives face a much harsher political adjustment when they exit their parents’ homes.

If it’s the first explanation, there’s not much that can be done about it. If it’s the second, however, then there’s probably not much to be done about it either, as these habits tend to be set early in life.

Daniel says his story is “developing”. I will stay tuned for further installments, which I imagine will include such pressing questions as, “Why are Conservatives More Fun than Liberals?”, “Why does the Left Score Lower on IQ Tests than the Right?”, and “When did the Left Stop Beating its Wife?”

My Five Favorite Posts of Last Year
Feel the quality. In chronological order.

1. National Football Strategies. Not mine, never could attribute it. But it’s funny.

2. Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams. Worth putting in because the book is so good, even if my early thoughts on it aren’t. Related followups are here and here.

3. Firms, Markets and Information. Thoughts on a post by Brink Lindsey.

4. Inequality and Incarceration. An effort to get some commentators to see that sentencing policy has an independent effect on who ends up in prison, over and above the crime rate. With followups here, and here.

5. Free Software = Socialism = Death. That’ll teach me to read TechCentralStation.

6. Market Discipline and Organizational Responsibility. Corporate fraud and responsibility-producing institutions.

Yes, I know that was six. Never mind.

My Five Most Read Posts of Last Year
These ones reeled in the hits.

1. Membership Has Its Privileges. Noting the appearance of a very odd honor indeed. We posted a followup a bit later on.

2. Shooting at the University of Arizona. A post about the horrible murder of three faculty members in the U of A nursing school by a bitter, depressed student with four hanguns to help him work out his problems.

3. Philosophy Discovers Society. Analytic Philosophy given a slight tweak.

4. Kahneman’s Nobel. Thoughts on the prize.

5. Political Sociology. It’s not my field, but here’s a reading list anyway.

Top Five Odd Google Searches That Led People Here

1. “index of doggie.jpg”

2. “weblog call girl”

3. “kieran healy animals” and “kieran healy god” (tie)

4. “show me how to write a comparative religion research paper”

5. “it is really stressful to write an essay”

translates the essence of the candidate, his or her accomplishments and future potential into a succinct profile in a way that differentiates the applicant from the competition. We scrutinize what each individual school emphasizes and custom tailor each application and essay in order to present our client in the best way possible.

Ivy Success will “will provide guidance on how to properly position the client for each school and application; garner letters of recommendation; write, edit, and re-write essays; schedule on campus visits and interviews; [and] establish application timing strategies”. After their consultant is through them them, clients “are able to present a cohesive and confident image of themselves” to admissions offices. The whole package costs eighteen thousand dollars. Alternatively, you can pay a thousand dollars just for extensive coaching on your admissions essay.

Now, the college admissions system to elite schools in the U.S. is so difficult and stressful, and the pressure to stand out from the crowd is so absurdly strong that I can see why these kinds of businesses have sprung up. But they raise an interesting question. Do we really want people to get into the habit of subcontracting their personalities?

Ivy Success’s scheme has plenty of precedent. The academically challenged offspring of financially gifted parents (in Garrison Keillor’s phrase) have long been able to improve their life-chances by hiring a private tutor, or buying a Princeton Review course. Beyond that, better-off and better-educated parents pass on a wealth of valuable knowledge to their children in the form of piano lessons, ballet classes, foreign holidays, or just having a good collection of jazz CDs around the house. Sociologists call this sort of thing “cultural capital.”

Ivy Success seems like the next logical step in the race to stay ahead of the neighbors. After all, it’s a sad fact of life that well-meaning, well-off parents with a rich appreciation of art, music and literature can nevertheless produce offensively boring, empty-headed children. What is to be done in these cases? Must all this parental investment go to waste? Not at all! If poor Muffy is earnest but dull, simply cough up $1000 and Ivy Success’s consultants will make her sound like Dorothy Parker. Never mind that Muffy has no idea who Dorothy Parker is. Deans of Admissions know, and that’s all that matters. A bit of judicious editing, a dash of sincerity, a pinch of sophistication and off she will go to the school of her choice.

The possibilities for expanding the business are intriguing. For instance, what happens when Muffy starts at Harvard? How will she keep up, given her essentially boring disposition? The answer should be obvious. For a monthly fee, Ivy Success could provide her with a Personal Personality Consultant (PPC) who would be on standby at all times. Her PPC would only be a phone call away, ready to advise. (This strategy has a lot of literary precedent, too.) Consumers would probably realise that what is interesting to one group of people might be boring to another, and yet being on good terms with several groups is often necessary for social success. The solution is to have several specialist PPCs. This way, Muffy could appear interesting to, say, both the Comp-Lit crowd and the Sorority Girls simultaneously. (This might involve numerous wardrobe changes.)

If you think that individuality isn’t something that can be purchased, then Ivy Consulting’s services will not seem very appealing. If you think individuality is overrated, however, you will point out that we already buy almost every other observable aspect of our identity, from branded clothes to manufactured music to focus-group-tested movies. Not to mention the large part of one’s identity that comes simply from having attended a particular university. Isn’t this just another niche in the market for identity?

Perhaps so. But there’s a further irony. In the struggle for college places, students desperately try to differentiate themselves from one another, so that they will be the ones chosen by the consumer—- in this case the Universities that admit them. But this struggle to stand out from the crowd merely leads to more homogeneity. The sociologist Harrison White points out that in markets like this, striving to be better requires—- and therefore induces—- comparability. In the process of trying to be different, competitors end up looking identical to consumers, just like McDonald’s and Burger King. Businesses like Ivy Success accelerate this process for college applicants. They sell the same product to every customer. The next person in the door after you will get more or less the same advice you did. It won’t take long for people to start looking the same.

I’m not sure whether, when deciding on admissions, elite colleges take seriously the personal statements written by applicants. If they don’t, then Ivy Success is getting money for nothing, and good luck to them. If they do, I hope they have some way of adjusting for the ability to purchase the illusion of charisma. After all, if your parents buy you piano lessons, you’ll really be able to play music for people. If they buy you a tutor and your SAT score jumps by 75, you haven’t actually cheated on the test. But if they buy you a personal essay, you’re still the bore you were before, no matter how appealing you sound.

You have to laugh. Otherwise, you’d have to cry.

Oi. Let’s assume this isn’t an elaborate, pointless hoax. In that case, the lesson to be learned here is: Kids! This is what happens when you don’t read enough philosophy and social science! You read a little bit—- perhaps Ayn Rand or Robert Pirsig, or Gary Zukav, or possibly Richard Dawkins or Lenin or Hayek. But then you stop. Or else, you get sucked into the orbit of some group of disciples. Argh! Pretty soon it’s too late, and you’re on your way to becoming the worst kind of semi-informed autodidact. You become imbued with a terrifying certainty that this book (whichever one it was you read) holds the key to all the philosophical problems you can think of. So you don’t have to read any more. Or you only have to read more in the same vein. Or you read alternative views but with your mind already made up. It’s fun to be completely certain about everything: arguments are much more enjoyable when you already know the answers and are in no danger of having your mind changed about something.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve read those books myself. Some of them are very good—- important, even. They get under people’s skin for a reason. And you could be reading something cracked, evil or both. But avoiding the real schlock isn’t enough to keep your brain healthy. Latching on to one idea and agressively obsessing about it is generally a sign that you’re turning into a crank. Fortunately for me, I’m just a sociologist so I don’t get too much direct mail from wackos. In this respect, I’m a lot luckier than Laurie, who does analytic metaphysics and is routinely annoyed by random people who want her to read their theories of the universe.

Futurology and Social Change
To develop the look of the film, Steven Spielberg consulted with a number of futurologists—- people who make a living telling us what life is going to be like soon. Futurology is a notoriously difficult business. Daniel Bell, a sociologist who in 1973 published one of the best efforts at social forecasting, disavowed the label altogether and caustically commented that most of what was written in this area could be written off as “future schlock“. Bell argued that, too often, futurologists picked out their favorite trend (or set of trends) and worked out what would happen if an entire society was reorganized because of it. Usually these trends were technological innovations or problems—- the rise of new media, advances in biotechnology, running out of oil, and so on. A problem with this approach was that it often assumed innovations would simply sweep away what came before them, and remake the world in their image. What actually happens, Bell argues, is that novel technologies overlay existing forms of social organization without obliterating them. So the shift from. say, agricultural to industrial society did not simply replace the former with the latter. Britain was the first country to go through the industrial revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The historian Eric Hobsbawm once remarked that if the changes there between 1780 to 1840 didn’t count as a revolution then nothing could. But even in Britain, industrial workers have never been a majority of the workforce. The past was not simply wiped away, and the new order did not take over completely.

The Future in Minority Report
The film respects this basic point about social change, and this is the main reason its vision of the future is compelling. Spielberg’s distillation of the futurologists’ predictions results in a world that mixes the familiar and the new in a convincing way. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) works in an antiseptic Department of PreCrime that is all perspex and chrome, but the city outside still has ratty backalleys, dumpsters and construction work. He drives a high-tech Lexus, recently assembled on a make-to-order production line, out to his ex-wife’s 20th-century wood-frame house by the lake. It’s convincing.

Two other features of Anderton’s world stand out. The first is that retinal scanning is everywhere. It’s used at work. People casually glance at the scanner as they enter their office building. It’s a tool of law enforcement. In a brilliant sequence, a team of electronic “spiders” search for Anderton in an low-income apartment building. The building’s residents hate the spiders but know exactly how to react to them. And most of all, retinal ID is used to pay for what you buy and (much worse) have products personally pitched at you by smart billboards wherever you go.

The second big change is the transport system. Cars (at least in the urban commuter areas) travel on huge highways that have vertical on- and off-ramps. The road network extends to channels on the sides of buildings, allowing cars to move up and down there, too. They are also permanently on autopilot. The only vehicles we see travelling freely are the Nautilus-like craft that the police force fly to precrime scenes.

How Plausible is it?
The use of retinal scanning was convincingly presented, I thought. Its close integration with both legal surveillance and commerce showed a future where both privacy and truly public space have pretty much vanished. You are tracked wherever you go, either by the state or by advertisers. The idea didn’t seem fully thought through, however. Commuters on the metro paid by glancing at a scanner above the door of the subway car. This didn’t seem right: people had to enter and exit the car far too slowly (rush hour is not that polite!). And besides, why have a scanner in every car? Why not just do it as they enter the station? But this is just a quibble..

The transport system, by contrast, seemed very unconvincing to me. It wasn’t the cars and the technology inside them, but the actual road network. It was too big and too tailored to the super-mobile future cars. I don’t see that kind of system being built any time soon. Now, a futurologist who predicted this might say that someone living in 1910 would have thought the idea of a vast interstate highway system similarly implausible. The difference is that now we already have one. There was space for interstates to be constructed in the 1950s, but now that system constitutes a giant installed base that’s unlikely to be replaced anytime soon. For the same reasons, our major cities rely on water and sewer systems that were built a century ago. It’s very difficult to replace—- or even significantly upgrade—- a basic piece of infrastructure once a working version of it is already in place.

Other Leads to Follow
There are plenty of other new gadgets that pop up in the film, and in each case Spielberg tries to show how they are well-integrated into everyday life. USA today is updated live on a paper-thin tablet. Surgery is good enough to replace your eyes. Holographic projection is pretty good. Computer interfaces have changed. And so on. Each of these could be looked at in more detail. USA Today tablet: quite possible. Whole-eye surgery: I doubt it. Holography: I’m not sure, but I’m skeptical. The clear screens of the computers and the tiny phones seemed good, but the keyboards were unrecognizable. Radical redesign of keyboards seems very unlikely, again thanks to the path-dependence created by the installed base. (The Gap is still in business, which also seems unrealistic right now.) In each case, the interesting question is, “Given the way things work now, does this innovation seem like it could be a part of everyday life then?”

This isn’t an unreasonable argument. Even the constitution itself uses the phrase “In the year of our Lord…“, and we don’t want to declare it unconstitutional. The only difficulty is that Americans have completely freaked out about the decision. The Senate immediately passed a 99-0 vote condemning it. A bunch of Congressmen assembled outside the Capitol and recited the Pledge. It’s front page news everywhere. CNN is running its lead story about this issue under a photo of little children holding their cute little hands to their darling little hearts as they say the pledge. And of course the more conservative Christian groups are apoplectic about the whole thing.

Corrected for the empirical data, then, the legal doctrine that will soon be used to overturn this ruling should read something like “These little references to God here and there are of course de minimis and meaningless, but don’t you dare touch them you Godless bastard“.