Comments on: Mea Culpa

By: Anthrodiva

Anthrodiva — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 13:20:03 +0000

Apparently you are not the only one confused:

From today’s New York Times – “Robert H. Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell University, is an anthropologist of the ultra-rich. His prior books “Luxury Fever” and “The Winner-Take-All Society” have explored how the earning and consuming patterns of the very wealthy affect society at large. (He’s no relation to fellow pluto-anthropologist Robert Frank of The Wall Street Journal, author of the recent book “Richistan.”)”

Why must everyone refer to themselves as ____ anthropologists? I find this debases our coin. No actual trained anthropologist gets anywhere near as much attention as people like Marion Nestle and Paco Underhill who label themselves as such…

By: Carol Gee

Carol Gee — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 07:35:00 +0000

Grant, this post is a clever classy “mea culpa,” something that is difficult to do. Whenever I need to do a similar post, which I surely will, I will look to this as good “boilerplate” off which I can play. Hang in there . . .

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 07:55:37 +0000

This problem would be less likely to arise if we all had unique identifiers, such as the digital object identifiers (DOIs) used for electronic documents. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_object_identifier

Any guesses as to when the UN mandates such IDs? I would say we will all have them by 2100.

By: jim twitchell

jim twitchell — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 19:24:09 +0000

Careful, Grant, there may be two Robert Franks, one who works at WSJ and is author of “Richistan,” and the other who is at Cornell and inveighs against luxe in “Luxury Fever.” Personally, I think they shd divide up the territory and have one — call him Bob — say it’s ok and the other — Robert — say “enough, or too much.” It gets even worse b/c the Cornell Frank writes a lot of op eds for NYTimes. The one who did WSJ piece this morning is the Richistan Frank. This is confusing, I know. I hope I got it right.