An apology: Friday I posted a reaction to a piece in Wall Street Journal called The Rich are Duller. I took aim at the man I took to be the author of this piece Robert H. Frank, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Thanks to a kind comment by Jim Twitchell (below) I now see the article was written by Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal. My sincere apologies to Mr. Robert Frank and Mr. Robert Frank.
References
Frank, Robert. 2007. The Rich Are Duller: new class of "Yawns" spurns yachts, wears Dockers in bid to be normal. Wall Street Journal. July 13, 2007, pp. W1-W2.
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.
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.
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 . . .
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…