The last couple of days I have been raiding the 10th anniversary issue of Saveur magazine. It introduced me, for instance, to the “eat local” movement.

This is pretty much what it sounds: a movement that encourages consumers to provision their tables from local farms.

There are lots of happy effects: the growth of farmers’ markets, unmediated relationships between producers and consumers, the creation of tiny niches of producer experiment and consumer response, the diminished use of preservatives, and so. But there is something odd about the movement, especially when it veers in the direction of orthodoxy. Some advocates of the Eat Local movement believe you can’t eat oranges unless you live in the Sun Belt.

This put me in mind of the manifesto penned by von Trier under the title Dogma 95. Von Trier and pals decided that the only thing that would save film making was a strict set of rules, rules they aptly call the “vow of chastity.” Among them: no additional lighting, no sounds not native to the scene being shot, all films to take place in the here and now, and my personal favorite, rule no. 6: “The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)”

Von Trier is a right wanker, this much is well known. (If you don’t believe me, treat yourself to his recent film Dogville.) But it is still hard to credit how utterly and astonishingly cowardly is the vow of chastity. It’s as if von Trier and company feel obliged to hew to orthodoxy because anything else puts them on a slippery slope. Without the uncompromising direction and discipline of the vow, von Trier could not trust himself to make a good film. (Allow a little added sound, and, before you know it, you’re making the Sound of Music.)

I’m all for people making better films but something in me wants to say, “well, you know, if you are saying you can only make good films when you surrender the creative options the art form makes available to you, I have to wonder whether you are not declaring your incompetence as an artist. If you have to give up your ability to make choices, you shouldn’t be making choices in the first place. Choices are what we pay you for, both in salary and reverence.”

The Eat Local movement as this same quality. It is a self imposed limitation. Not doubt this springs from good motives and a certain seriousness of intent, but really, when you decide to give away what a culture of plenitude and transformation makes available to you, are you not declaring yourself unworthy of this culture?

We see this from time to time, a certain panic in the face of our thoroughgoing dynamism and multiplicity. This was funny when the Fluxus art movement said, what would happen to my art if I imposed this tiny, nuttily arbitrary little constraint upon myself? But when it is practiced in this wholesale manner, to foreswear all the technological advances of film making, or the distribution system that puts Brazilian food in my back yard, one feels obliged to shake one’s head. Isn’t there a Greek myth, or is it a Grimm’s fairy tale, about a man who is given everything and then decides he doesn’t want it? Can the economic actor really be this perverse?

The economics and anthropology enterprise, the one that wonders at the emergent properties of markets and cultures, depends on the supposition that actors will make choices. Without these choices, experiments do not happen. The invisible hand falls still. Nothing “emerges.”

What’s really scary about this “choice against choice” inclination is that it dresses itself up in indignation. It becomes the way sophisticated people show their discernment in matters of food and film, and their disdain for the mainstream. Is this what the avant-garde has come to? It is no longer an experimentation in the very new, an exploration of the far edge of possibility, but a refusal of the full range of choice. Could this be a fit of pique practiced by the Left in protest against the fact that markets did what markets were supposed to stand against: the creation of more and more options and the effortless incorporation of the new. Can we say at least that the most important locus of creativity and innovation has moved away from the artist into the very thing the artist stood against: the marketplace?

Na. Couldn’t be.

References

Andrews, Colman. 2004. Ten Years of Cooking and Eating in America, 1994-2004. Saveur Magazine, 10th Anniversary Special. October 2004, pp. 87, 94.

For more on the creative powers of the marketplace: Tyler Cowen in print: Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. and on line.

More on the “eat local” movement here.

More on “Dogma 95” and the vow of chastity here.

Yesterday, I offered data from Saveur Magazine to suggest our knowledge and practice of food is becoming more sophisticated (Food I). In the words of Kalins:

…there’s an awareness of food and a love of food and an array of choices that we’ve never had before. You go down an aisle in the supermarket and you find things you never even knew how to pronounce ten years ago.

But there is also plenty of evidence that we are, in the words of Eric Schlosser, a “fast food nation.” Americans are eating more junk food. They are also eating more prepared food. Salt, sugar, fat proportions are all up. The obesity figures have risen apace.

A paradox then: Americans are eating better. Americans are eating worse.

One way to make this paradox go away is to segment the world into two groups: a small group of Americans that is ever more sophisticated in its eating habits and a much larger group eating more and more badly.

This confirms to the “plenitude” view of the world, the one that says contemporary culture no longer has a directionality. It is not headed in any direction, good eating or bad. We are a culture dedicating to mapping all the possibilities. What can be, will be. Yes to good food. Yes to bad food.

But there is another, more interesting, possibility: that good food and bad food are happening to the same people. In this view, Americans are growing more sophisticated in their knowledge of food. They are stocking better kitchens with better food. But by and large, they are eating prepared food.

There was a time when we would have hunted out the “cognitive dissonance” this sort of thing causes. But not anymore. I think we may be looking at a “virtual consumption” as a result of which people “consume” the knowledge and image of good food…and the stuff and substance of bad food. They eat what they eat: food that is prepared out of the house, often by fast food suppliers. But they consume what they read in magazines and cook books and watch on TV.

This approach would help explain how it is people can spend so much on kitchens, cook books, and cooking shows and so little time on cooking itself. This is what is going on in the Martha Stewart phenomenon, when people watch the show with pleasure without ever making or thinking to make that dining room center piece. In a sense, Martha’s making it for us. Martha’s making it so we don’t have to. Martha’s making it because, let’s be honest, we don’t have the time.

The good food/bad food paradox might work like this. The TV chefs, the magazines, and an occasional “slow food” meal at home, these are the virtual diet. This diet is modest in taste and substance, but it is, just as clearly, rich in cultural and identity meanings. The rest of the time, with bad or ordinary food, we are “feeding the machine.”

This is not a variation on the old practice called “potatoes and point” in which people during the potato famine would spear yet another piece of potato and point it the last remaining piece of Cod in the house, so to imagine the potato was Cod. We do not overlay the virtual consumption overtop actual consumption. Nor is it compensatory in the Veblenian or any other sense of the term.

No, this is a weird “division of labor” thing, where we are prepared to farm out some of our experience to other agents, that they might do the consuming (and preparing) for us. Consumption has always been a fount of cultural and personal meanings. But classifically we have demanded that we may only claim these meanings when we do the consuming. Now, it appears we are prepared to appoint virtual consumers (and preparers) who do the meaning creation and harvest for us.

We need a new model of the consumer, and a new model of the “economic man” to understand this. Trying to think it makes your head hurt, doesn’t it, and surely that’s a good sign.

References

Dorothy Kahlins quote is from Saveur Magazine, October 2004, p. 98.

McCracken, Grant. 2005/6. Plenitude. Forthcoming: Indiana University Press.

Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial.

There’s an article by Clive Thompson in New York Magazine called The Rise of the Microneighborhood.

Examine almost any area of Manhattan these days and you’ll find it balkanized into a set of breakaway microneighborhoods. (41)

I’m an interested, eager reader of Thompson’s work: interested because he is a fellow Canadian and in my clannish way I want all Canadians to flourish (except Robert McNeil, of course, Do You Speak American? is so tedious, it should be declared anti-intellectual) and eager because he is a bona fide talent.

But this is outing disappoints.

First, theory has yet to catch up to data. Thompson offers glib explanations for microneighborhoods, saying that the phenomenon is “very much a creature of real-estate opportunism” and fuelled by overheated marketing and ‘today’s rampant cult of branding.” (42)

Then he spends the rest of the article teasing out the many, conflicting factors that help decide whether a new neighborhood gets named and whether the naming takes. We begin to see that declaring a new microneighborhood is a performative undertaking, to borrow Austin’s term. That is to say, “wishing (or in this case, saying) makes it so” but only when several “felicity conditions” are satisfied: who is there in the first place (owners, customers, street people, etc), how is persuaded to move in, whether and how the neighborhood is bounded, how investment and value clusters and how long it clusters for.

In sum, the microneighborhood is an “emergent” and dynamic phenomenon, the success of which is driven as much by a shifting complex of factors and not only “real estate opportunism and the rampant cult of branding.” As Thompson notes in the case of BeBeMo, the naming game sometimes fails.

It’s all inside. If Thompson need only conceptualize the factors he describes for Manhattan, to give us a more robust and illuminating explanation. It is in any case time for us to move on from those canards of “opportunism” and “cults,” so obligatory in the 1990s, to something a little more… nuanced. Let’s start with the notion that culture (in this case the organization of urban space) and commerce (in this case, real estate investment) do not so much collide as interpenetrate.

Second, this development in the organization of urban space is part and parcel of a larger trend that escapes Thompson altogether. (This can’t be true. I should say it escapes mention, not Thompson.) Have we not see a balkanization of music, film, fashion, and just about everything else in popular culture? Is there any reason why the real estate market should resist ths notion? Plainly, Manhattan is turning itself into a real life demonstration of Zeno’s paradox, but this is one of the signatures of our culture. Can we not see this trend as driven by larger cultural forces?

Third, there is a failure of reflexivity here. Isn’t Thompson doing with “microneighborhood” precisely what the New York real estate agent is doing with “NOLITA”: trying to be the first one name and claim the next new thing? Isn’t this the name of the game, at least as New York Magazine plays it: scouring pop culture for the next new “neighborhood.” Both Thompson and agent are seeking glory, profit, and, yes, branding advantage for themselves. Indeed, so much of New York City is in on this game, it seems wrong to sneer at real estate agents for doing it and a little odd to hold the journalist apart.

References

Austin, J.L. How to Do Things With Words. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thompson, Clive. 2005. The Rise of the Microneighborhood. New York. January 2, 2005, pp. 40-43.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to NotBored for the map of Greenwich village and the regime of cultural surveillance of which New York magazine and real estate agents are both part.

Some of us are trying to tunnel into economics. Others are tunneling out.

Ben Ho is an economics graduate student at Stanford. He notes:

There are economic theories of language, love, persuasion, morality, bias, family, discrimination, leadership and more. […] My current research is about apologies. The most daunting part of getting a doctoral degree is that you have to become the world’s expert in some area, however small, of human knowledge. An easy way of accomplishing this is to pick a topic no one else has thought to attempt. The economics of apologies fits the bill, either because I am so creative and clever to come up with it or because no one else has been crazy enough to think it worth studying.

Tunneling is, as Ben notes, high risk and high gain. There’s a good chance that the disciplinary “wardens” will open fire from the watchtower, unleash the dogs, and announce, after a few days, “let the swamps do it!” And that’s the end of you. In Ben’s diagnostic, you’re “crazy” or at least malarial.

Not always. There is a small chance someone will say, “A tunnel! Great. Let’s scram!” In this event, you are considered “creative and clever” for having found a way out. At the very least, you get props for inspiring someone to use the word “scram.”

The “wardens” of anthropology insist that anthropology and economics must keep their distance. (Good fences, blah, blah, blah.) No tunneling! Economics is bad because it insists on methodological individualism and a means-end rationality.

Rational actors making choices? Anthropology isn’t interested in individuals but in communities. It isn’t interested in choices, but in meanings. It resents the fact that Economics gives itself all the things that enable rational choice: meanings, codes, the conventions of the marketplace, the definition of “value,” the content of “interest,” the pragmatics of “advantage.”

The wardens also believe traditional societies embedded their economies in cultural and social context. The arrival of a less embodied marketplace must spell the end of society and culture.

Two small problems with the warden point of view:

1. It turns out that commercial cultures are more generative, more inventive, more, in a sense, cultural (or at least more culture) than non commercial ones. Non commercial cultures may be kinder, gentler, and more reciprocal, but they are, truth be told, a little like provincial theatre: sleepy, repetitive and a little dull. Yes, we look fondly on this aspect the human experience, but something in us wants to call for a play doctor. And what about casting? And can someone do something about those costumes, please?

2. It turns out the marketplace is not the end of culture but a way of doing culture that we are only now beginning to understand. Somehow, markets make culture not by fiat, not by time-out-of-mind tradition, but in something like real time out of the choices of rational individuals, lots and lots of individuals.

Hayek was among the first to call attention to the emergence of large-scale order from individual choices. The phenomenon is ubiquitous, and not just in economic markets: What makes everyone suddenly drive SUVs, name their daughters Madison rather than Ethel or Linda, wear their baseball caps backwards, raise their pitch at the end of a sentence? The process is still poorly understood by social science, with its search for external causes of behavior, but is essential to bridging the largest chasm in intellectual life: that between individual psychology and collective culture. Steven Pinker on Reason-on-line

Back to Ben. Anthropologies are good at thinking about how the tiny interpersonal exchanges of everyday life (glances, gazes, comment, and, yes, apologies) serve to create “large scale” order. They badly need the help of an economist who can help them understand how these exchanges work as economies. Ben Ho has our best wishes. We suggest he also take a flare gun.

References

Hayek for the 21st Century. Reason on line. January 2005. http://www.reason.com/0501/hayeksidebar.shtml

Ho, Ben. 2005. Consider an economics theory of apologies. The Stanford Daily, January 7, 2005 here

McCracken, Grant. 2004. The Economics of the Gaze. here

McCracken, Grant 2004. More on Gaze economies. here

McCracken, Grant. 2004. Just looking around in Manhattan. here

How fast is China changing?  Hui (pictured here) is changing very fast indeed. 

On his retirement, Hui (not his real name) was entitled to an apartment.  This apartment had several advantages.  It was large.  It was part of his retirement package” and really inexpensive.  Most important, it was close to his family and his grandson.

That’’s why he rejected it.

"Huh?"”

I was sitting in his tiny, chilly living room.  Jetlagged, disoriented, and freezing, I was asking "slow pitch" questions in the hope of slow pitch answers.  Something I could hang on to.  Dream on, Grant.  This is China.

"So why didn’’t you want to live close to your grandson?”" I bleated.

"I don’’t want to be a wise old man,”" he explained.

Hui said he did not wish to be stuffed into the conventional notions that await the elderly.  He was, he said, curious about retirement without "retirement."”   He was happy to be a "friend”" to his grandson.  He just didn’’t want to have to be his "grandfather.”"

Who knows what we are looking at here?  I am no China expert.  (I do labor to make this clear to my clients but they send me anyhow.)  It looks like the virus of individualism.  But it cannot be that this man one day sat up in bed and said, "that’’s it.  From now on, I will define myself for my own purposes, by my own efforts.  Damn the stereotypes."”  More probably, this is an idea and an inventiveness that has ancient, revolutionary, Western, and contemporary origins in China.

If there are other Huis, and I think there have to be, China is not the great, lumbering monolith so beloved by the Western press.  It is 1.4 billion people, some of whom are prepared to step out of Chineseness into something else.”  Or perhaps their Chineseness has a Heraclitian quality.  In any case, this vast body politic appears to have a difference virus. 

Who knows?  Not me.  But here is something else that’’s American about the Chinese experiment.  In addition to the adaptive powers noted yesterday, there is a willingness to engage in "identity improv.”"  This is, as we know, a fount of cultural innovation, creating, as it does, an inducement and materials for others who might wish to engage in self transformation, too.

People who engage in self transformation are pretty good at every kind of innovation.  They rush to the theatre, to fiction, to poetry, as archaeologies of what the self might hold, as weather reports on new selves rolling across the continent (high pressure zones and all), as prognostications of what’’s next (retirement without retirement, say). 

They are also pretty good at the innovations of a dynamic marketplace.  Certain national competitors to the American experiment have borrowed liberally, and finally too much.  And of course the Chinese now borrow shamelessly themselves.  But if all real creativity is finally the same act, contributing to a common pool, in the enablement of a collective frame of mind, then we may suppose (if this example is not completely unreliable and of course it might be), that the Chinese are well prepared for a free wheeling and dynamic form of capitalism. 

There are lots of questions here.  But here’’s one: will China ever be as disintermediated as the US?  As it stands, the US has something like a cultural FedEx up and running.  This means that almost any innovation produced by American culture can find its way to almost any recipient.  (This system is not perfect and it is still being constructed, to be sure.)  China is a place that is still massively mediated, not least by the remaining presumption of a ruling party that it knows best.   We can imagine a system in which there is plenty of innovation taking place, but most of it finally squeezed out or kept out by the distribution system.  A Shakespeare emerges in a northern province and is never given a "shot”" at the Beijing theater.  Or, much worse, he finds his way to Beijing but he is excluded by standing elites and cliques.  Or, somewhat last grandly, Hui "reinvents"” grandparenthood but his innovations die with him.

This is of course a job for anthropologists and other social scientists.  The bad news here is that many of them are so deeply provincial and so badly out of touch with the real structural properties of American capitalism they are pretty much disqualified from the intelligent treatment of capitalism as it is being reinvented for the 21st century.  (I just had to get that shot in.  It’s the nicotine deficit talking, I’m quite sure of it.)

Sarah Milroy (Globe and Mail) asked me for thoughts on the Christmas tree. A few preliminary notions:

The Christmas tree is first and foremost an invitation to disaster. No tree serves its ceremonial role unless it tips over a couple of times. This happens once while the family is away. They return to chaos and a badly startled cat. It happens again with all the family present, when the tree just keels over, as if from seasonal exhaustion, in a slow motion slide that draws everyone out of their seats, ornaments flying, children hollering, pets scattering. Rueful hilarity ensues. Christmas trees are never not tippy. That’s the way we like them.

Trees come from the countryside, the way a lot of commerce used to do, making their way to the city in open trucks, driven by people who set up opportunistically and engage in a brisk exchange that favors cash, bargaining, contingent pricing (dress modestly, buy early or very late), and the utter absence of TQM. Each tree has its own virtues, drawbacks and individuality.

No brands, loyalty programs, or greeters, here. The seller is often a rum looking customer, not our first choice as the first bearer of this glad tiding. The consumer is captive of a state of uncertainly, struggling to remember how high the living room ceiling is. And the “product” is rough cut, oozing sap, richly aromatic, already shedding, and almost certainly the least processed thing in the home. .

Trees undergo a transformation cycle (Munn, as below). First we place them in a stand that guarantees their tippiness. Sure enough, the tree is too tall. We forgot to leave room for the star on top. Dad must find his saw, and emergency surgery is performed. There! The tree stands in the corner of the living room. Someone says, “It will fill out. Give it a little time.” Someone else says, “It’ll be fine. Really.” And then the tree begins its first slow tilt, and everyone tilts as well, as if to keep the thing level in their gaze.

Mom must now find the ornaments. This is one of the mysteries of household management: that she can store them, that she can find them, that they have survived all the fort building and roughhousing in the basement, that they emerge finally from makeshift containers more or less in tact. And when they emerge, behold, another mystery.

Things bought for not much money years ago have taken on a depth and value that they did not have when they issued from a Chinese factor, did not have when purchased at Wal-Greens, did not seem capable of when first “put up.”. Cheap pieces of junk now have something like the status of heirlooms. Christmas is often seen as a war between commerce and culture (Nissenbaum, below) but it is often something more collaborative (Schmidt).

The Christmas tree is sometimes a family tree. Some of the ornaments come from the homes and childhoods of Mom and Dad. Some came as gifts from distant aunts. All of them reference former homes. “We bought this one when you were just three. Just after we moved into Quesnel Drive.” And together they are evocations of Christmases past and opportunities to tell the stories Mom never tires of telling. After all, it’s Mom’s job to make these relatives relative, to create a narrative to make this heterogeneous crew feel and act like a family. Christmas is a story telling, story making opportunity. These ornaments are voluble.

The star is never perfect. It is too near the ceiling, despite the surgery, and must sometimes be “squished in.” Milroy asked me to talk about power and identity. And we could begin here. Dad remains the putative head of the household in this disputed hierarchy. He and the star have place of pride, but this is cramped and insecure, the tippiest thing on this tippy tree.

The lights go on, special effects by Noma surprisingly effective in a George Lucas age. The tinsel goes up, bunching here, looking a little thread bare there. And eventually the presents begin to pile up. In a jaundiced age, it is fashionable to think of these as an acquisitive intrusion in the “wonderful life” for which the season stands. But if we look more carefully, we see that these gifts reflect how much the family cares, how hard they tried to find the “perfect thing,” and, when things go well, how profoundly they know one another. Good families give good presents, good presents give good families.

Trees are tippy, I think, because the holiday season is so compressed. Feelings run high, tensions and contradictions surface, stuff goes wrong. Trees supply moments of glory, and, like inebriated but good hearted uncles, they also supply moments of very useful comedic relief.

References

Barnett, James H. 1954. The American Christmas: A Study in National Culture. New York: Macmillan.

Belk, Russell. 1987. A Child’s Christmas in America: Santa Claus as Deity, Consumption as Religion. Journal of American Culture 10, no. 1: 87-1000.

Belk, Russell W. 1989. Materialism and the Modern U.S. Christmas. in Interpretive Consumer Research. editor Elizabeth C. Hirschman, 115-35. Provo: Association for Consumer Research.

Caplow, Theodore. 1982. Christmas Gifts and Kin Networks. American Sociological Review 47: 383-92.

Geertz, Clifford. 1972/1973. Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight. In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Miller, Daniel, editor. 1993. Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The fame of Gawa : a symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Nissenbaum, Stephen. 1996. The battle for Christmas. 1st ed. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. 1995. Consumer rites : The buying and selling of American holidays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Last note: my apologies to those who referenced this post on their blogs when it was first posted, two Saturdays ago. Sarah Milroy, the Globe reporter who solicited my comment, asked me to take the post down till she had filed her story. I obliged her and in the process left several of you with URLs that pointed to a phantom post. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Tomorrow, some thoughts on Milroy’s behavior.

When we change [advertising] campaigns and have 11 different looks to a brand at any one time, we’re swimming upstream.

Charles B. Fruit
Senior Vice President and chief marketing officer of The Coca-Cola Company

When you enter the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, it’s hard not to be impressed. You pass through immense gates, and see, first, a sculpture above a reflecting pool. Water pours over the lip of the pool steadily, continuously, inexorably, a symbol both of all the Coke presently in motion on the planet, and all the wealth that comes from it.

Inside the building, the foyer is a two story oval, done in buttery marble, with The Coca-Cola Company written in Spenserian script on the wall. You stop for a moment and goggle at what the sculptor has done: inserting a running font into a curving wall. Perfectly. The message here: Ain’t nothing to it.

Inside the offices of this vast complex, you see the art of Nast, Sundblom, and Rockwell, early architects of the Coke brand. Apparently, these commercial artists could do anything, too. What they did for Coke was to help make it stand for something utterly, foundationally American. They made Coke and America mutually presupposing.

But something happened to America. It went from a couple of ideas of Americanness to many ideas of Americanness. This may be hard to see from the genteel surroundings of Atlanta headquarters and from the pleasant residential world of Buckhead, but you only had to look at the CSD (carbonated soft drink) “category.”

It stopped being a category. Suddenly, there were new age drinks (Snapple), energy drinks (Red Bull), nutritional drinks (7 Up Plus), lots of little start ups working every niche, and some very scrappy competitors (Pepsi). Not one America, but many Americas. And in this new choice set, Coke began to look too sweet, too caffeinated, too fattening, a little unhealthy, and, gasp, a little old fashioned.

But it’s hard to say goodbye. The Coke idea, monolithic, magnificent, majestic, is a compelling one. And it is presently written into all the surfaces of the corporate culture. The culture “out there” may be splintering into thousands of pieces. But inside the marble palace, things are still. When they move, they pour. This is a problem.

How do you get thousands of employees suddenly to change their most basic assumptions about their company? After all, the beliefs and attitudes that make up a culture filter into everything else: decisions on basic strategy, management style, staffing, performance expectations, product development. That’s why the problems at Coke have proven so intractable.

There are lots of technical reasons why it is hard for a corporation to move from mass marketing to micro marketing. Chiefly, mass is a volume game. How do you move to micro and sustain your numbers?

But there is another, cultural reason for the difficulty. It is that the Coca-Cola Company is the captive of its own success. It is blinded by its brand. The brand works most effectively where it proves to be most dangerous, stultifying, and confining: in Atlanta, at Coke headquarters.

So when Chuck Fruit complains that aggressive marketing can leave the brand with 11 looks at one time, we must ask, “and that’s a bad thing how?” There are at least 11 Americas. Maybe it’s time to turn the flag ship brand into the flotilla it needs to be.

References

Foust, Dean. 2004. Gone Flat. BusinessWeek. December 20, 2004, pp. 77-82.
[source of both quotes]

Terhune, Chad. 2004. Healthy Bubbles? Soda Companies Juice Up Drinks. Wall Street Journal. December 14, 2004, pp. B1, B4.

Acknowledgements

Tom Guarriello for a recent discussion on brands and corporate cultures.

Target has just banned Salvation Army kettles. This is bad news because last year the SA raised $9 million at Target, about 10% of their yearly total. Bah humbug.

So whose Christmas is it, anyway? The presence of red kettles is one of the ways we mark the season. And there is something Dickensian about those kettles. They are as much a part of the holiday tableau as the crèche and Santa, and a good deal more ecumenical than either one.

But Target owns the sidewalk in front of the store, apparently. They decide what goes there and what goes on there. How we mark the season does not matter.

Hmm. What is the buzz in branding and marketing circles? It’s the notion of “co-creation.” Here’s the way John Winsor describes it:

A brand…is created through communication; it is the joint construction of company and consumer who, together, co-create the brand’s meaning throughout their mutual relationship.

This new approach to marketing means, among other things, that Target cannot banish parts of Christmas without breaking a contract, to wit, that we will accept their place in the season if they accept our idea of the season.

Instead, Target decided to get “all imperial” about it. They said, in effect, all your base are belong to us.

I refer, of course, to the famous video in which kids demonstrate a stunningly successful mastery of the technologies of commercial communication. The video steals a particularly hilarious scene from an early Asian video game (“all your base are belong to us”) and inserts it into every commercial venue imaginable: bill boards, packaging, road signs, brand names, and the cityscape.

The “all your base are belong to us” video demonstrates (see Jenkins here) what it means to grow up in a commercial culture. Two kids sitting in a rec room with Mom’s PC can create a pretty effective piece of communication. They then used it to issue an imperial declaration of their own: all our base are belong to them.

This consumer manifesto was clear. We are no longer prepared to think of ourselves as passive recipients of commercial culture. We get the grammar and the content of this culture and we are inclined to appropriate it for our own purposes. Some brands think of co-creation as a paternalistic gesture, a way of “making nice.” But “all your base do belong to us” and many other acts of consumer appropriation tell us that co-creation is not a discretionary gesture, but a chance to board a new trend train before it has entirely left the station.

It is time for brands to sit up and take notice. The culture on which they draw does not belong to them, and they tinker with it at their peril. We must wonder when this penny will drop at Target. Oh, that’s right, no bucket.

References

Hempel, Jessi. 2004. The Salvation Army’s Leaky Kettle. BusinessWeek. December 20, 2004.

Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge.

Winsor, John. 2004. Beyond the Brand. Chicago: Dearborn, p. viii.

Acknowledgements

Andrew Zolli for alerting me to the All Your Base Are Belong To Us video

All Your Base Are Belong to Us website here

Yesterday’s post drew a comment that got me thinking.

It’s true that feminism deserves the credit for Laura’s liberty. But there is a weird little contradiction in how this works.

Some feminist innovators make their case in the strongest terms possible. The extreme quality of the case has a curious dual effect. First, it will draw antagonism from the center which will sometimes react by refusing the feminist case and the feminist champion. But the extremists do extraordinarily valuable work, despite their talent for antagonism. By sitting up on the far margin of debate, they have the effect, second, of “opening up the middle.”

The further feminists go, the easier it is for less radical creatures to adopt feminist principals and behaviors with relative impunity. We could think of this in a Venn diagram. The further feminists push the margin outwards, the more space they open up in the middle. Principals and behaviors that used to be marginal are now, relative speaking, mainstream. What used to be exceptional now begins to fall within the ambit of the ordinary (or at least non-kooks-ville).

There are several things to say here:

The extreme feminists are effectively sacrificial creatures. The more extreme they make themselves, and the more space they open up, the more they are likely to be vilified as “kooks.”

When this sacrifice is offered as self sacrifice, there is something pretty noble going on. That is to say, when feminists are extreme in order to open up the middle, they must know that their gesture will be antagonizing and effective in equal parts, that it must, more exactly, be antagonizing in order to be effective.

The trouble is that the social actor in this case may or may not have an inkling of their role as innovators, no sense, that is to say, of the effect for which they are responsible. Often, the extreme feminist takes up his or her position with the idea that the world should “just snap out of it” and embrace with the innovation and the innovator. When this does not happen, as it rarely will, the innovator is left with a sense of injustice. That their brand of feminism has been refused seems to say to them that no version of feminism is accepted.

The extremist does not see always see the social dynamic they have set in train. So they do not see that their disappointment is the very nature of the bargain, the very price required of them. But that’s still pretty horrible. At the end of the day, the extreme feminist is punished twice. Once for being extreme, and again when they find their best ideas taken from them.

This problem is exacerbated by some extreme feminists (and innovators in any camp.) These people insist that it isn’t feminism unless its extreme, and its not feminism unless you call it so. The mainstreamers are always going to refuse the strong form for the weak one, and they are never going to call the innovation feminism. This is another way of saying that the innovator guarantees her tragic status. Nothing but full adoption and acknowledgement counts as success. Everything else is failure.

The radical feminist finds perhaps to her horror that the mainstream is prepared to adopt the weak form of the innovation, and then, as wonky thanks, they insist on killing the messenger. This means that when Laura embraces feminist liberties, it is highly unlikely that anyone will give “props” to the originators and disseminator of these ideas. Still more abstractly, we might say here that social construction and self destruction work hand and hand.

Too many branding books have a sui generis quality. They are free standing and self referential. They strive to be, in the dictionary definition of the term, ‘the only example of its kind; constituting a class of its own; unique.”

Branding books don’t acknowledge other branding books. They don’t build on the history of the field. They don’t draw very much on the field of marketing. They insist that everything we know about branding is wrong. They ask for amnesia. And we too often oblige them. It’s as if the field of branding begins again with each new book.

I had drinks last night with Nick Hahn (Vivaldi Partners) and we were talking about this problem. Nick made the point that people are not so much writing about brands as making one up. And it’s ok when a Nike One campaign doesn’t reference Titlist golf balls or the history of golf. It’s not supposed to. But this is, surely, a rum way to create a community of knowledge and a common pool of intellectual capital.

I then had dinner with Debbie Millman, (Sterling Group), and she added to Nick’s point. Brand books reproduce not just the method but the error of branding, preferring all too often to see the brand statically, with scant regard for its continuities or dynamism.

Divorced in intellectual space and time, brand books have a problem. They fatally confuse the act of thinking about brands with the act of creating them.

I find myself increasingly drawn to models of the brand that assume that the brand is a complex thing with many elements. Part of the problem here is that we are all blind men (and women) and an elephant. Someone describes the feet. This branding. Someone describes the truck. No, this is branding. I am inclined to think we need to see the elephant whole.

For Nokia recently, I suggested we might think of the brand as a sailing ship. This gives us at least three pieces to work with. There is the deep ballast of the brand, the long standing cargo of meanings that are being transshipped across continents over extended periods. There is the deck cargo that comes and goes with each call to port. And there are the sails that are constantly being changed and trimmed to respond to the “in course” corrections that must be made from moment to moment. Every brand must be made up of diverse meanings, some enduring, some changeable, some very fleeting indeed.

And today, I was thinking that we could haul out the dear old psychological chestnut: the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Maslow posited an array of needs and each level seems to me, when used metaphorically, to suggest another aspect of the brands.

The brand must speak to the “physiological need” for utility of some kind. This is where lots of companies get stuck. They suppose its all about functions and they stuff in lots of product features accordingly.

The brand must speak to the “safety need.” And, again metaphorically, this speaks to the issue of ‘trust.” The consumer must know the brand is ‘there for them” in quality, service and damage control. Here too people get stuck. I want to respond, “yes, well, trust is one of the most fundamental meanings contained in the brand, but it is necessary, not sufficient.”

There is the “need for love, affection and belongingness” and this seems to me to capture the brand community work by Fournier and others. The consumer would like to see themselves as belonging to the brand, as being caught up in its sociality. Both Mercedes and Harley Davidson create this kind of club.

There is the need for “need for esteem” and here we have a more private relationship, one between the consumer and not other consumers, but the brand itself. As we all know, this connection can be deeply meaningful and play out several, deeply meaningful aspects of the self from which esteem eventually issues.

And finally there is the “need for self-actualization.” And here we see one of the most astonishing functions of the brand in our culture, the way it serves individuals as a way of supplying new, potential, notions of the self. Here brands work as a staging area, or an audition stage, with which the consumer contemplates and tries on new definitional possibilities. (“Am I Nike golfer or a Titlist one?”) When the audition is complete, the brand then assists the consumer self-actualize, in this case, to make the meanings of the brand the meanings of the self.

No, it’s not at all perfect. But notice that I did not ask you to forget everything you know about branding but tried instead to build a house of many mansions into which diverse notions of the brand might be assembled. Let us be more inclusive, more ecumenical, more integrative. Because some things we know are worth keeping.

By the 19th century, the department store was the most powerful force in retail. By the end of the 20th century, it was struggling to survive.

Department stores were good at grandeur but not so good at creating value for the things it sold or the consumer who shopped there. Indeed, from a brand point of view, the store proved actually entropic. Large, disorganized, understaffed, badly appointed, the department store actually diminished the meanings of the brand.

This is why, in the 1980s, brands began to demand a small corner of the department store for themselves. Ralph Lauren created its own little zone, complete with its own décor, pictures of rowing teams, old school oars. This was potent meaning manufacture but it came from a stow-away on the SS Department store. The brand was in effect wresting the retail experience out of the hands of the department store. To add injury to this insult, the national brand began to set up boutiques and retail outlets of its own. The Departure was now large, clueless and vulnerable, a relic of the retail experiment.

I couldn’t help wondering whether this fate might some day over take Wal-Mart. To be sure, Wal-Mart is, at the moment, the most powerful force in retail. Eight per cent of retail goods sold in the US are sold at Wal-Mart. On the day after Thanksgiving, Wal-Mart stores sold $1.5 billion in merchandise. The sales total for the year will be something like $300 billion.

But signs of trouble in today’s and yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Wal-Mart is facing competition on four fronts. It is not very good at fashion, and here Target poses a threat. It is not very good at making a connection to the locality and here stores like HEB supermarkets in Texas pose a threat. It is bad at things that are unusual. “Toy experts say an increasing number of affluent parents are avoiding Wal-Mart Stores … in a quest for higher-quality and more-unusual fare. ‘I think what we’re seeing is an anti-Wal-Mart backlash.’” Most of all, it is bad at making meaning. “Bed, Bath and Beyond is about selling lifestyle and Wal-Mart is about selling a commodity.” (Marshall Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD group).

In short, Wal-Mart is good at price but bad at meaning. It can “pile em high and sell em cheap.” But in the process it reduces the brand to a commodity and the retail experience to a trudge through tedium. Placed in the Wal-Marts , brands created to deliver potent meanings, fashion, locality, individuality and lifestyle, are diminished or missing. Wal-Mart actually manages to wick away the very meanings that add value to the product and the life of the consumer.

Price is a potent advantage. And clearly Wal-Mart delivers here like crazy. With special relationships with off shore suppliers and the advantage of huge runs, the Wal-Mart advantage is unbeatable. But the rise of new competitors tells us what we have always known: the price is a necessary condition of consumer engagement not a sufficient one. The consumer culture turns not just on commodities, but on products that carry new and potent meanings into the life of the consumer. Take these out and, the results are clear. As Lear would say, “Allow not nature more than nature needs/ Man’s life is cheap as beasts.”

Companies, too.

References

Merrick, Amy, Gary McWilliams, Ellen Byron and Kortney Stringer. 2004. Targeting Wal-Mart. Wall Street Journal. December 1, 2004.

Pereira, Joseph and Stephanie Kang. 2004. Toys March Upmarket. Wall Street Journal. December 2, 2004.

Shakespeare, William. 1606. King Lear. Act III, Scene iv.

Warren, Susan. 2004. Texas Grocer Thrives by Catering to Locals. Wall Street Journal. December 1, 2004.

Williams, Rosalind H. 1982. Dream worlds: mass consumption in late nineteenth-century France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Intel has stumbled. The stock price has declined 25% this year. The company has cancelled a succession of high-profile projects. The competition, Advanced Micro Device, has taken a lead or two in product development. For two decades the most formidable Silicon Valley company, Intel suddenly looks mortal.

No mystery here. Intel is caught in an age-old difficulty: making the transition from a technology-centric company to a consumer-centric one.

As long as the game was about faster chips, Intel was preeminent. The corporate culture was dedicated to very smart people making very fast chips. In the words of the New York Times, “Until recently, selling Intel chips was easy: faster was better.”

But now the industry is becoming consumer centric. Everyone, IBM and HP, have taken a bead on the home and especially the living room. As Fred Zieber says, “There may be a tremendous global war for control of the living room.” For its part, the NYT says, Intel now seeks to make “complete systems aimed at both computing and consumer electronics markets.”

What a difference the consumer difference makes. When technology-centric, the corporation can turn in on itself. But when consumer-centric, the corporation must open up to who the consumer is, what the consumer needs and how the technology will be used. In the language of the Intel motto, it’s no longer “all inside.”

To its credit, Intel understands the importance of the technology-consumer transition. In May, it will appoint its former head of marketing, Paul S. Otellini, as CEO. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Inc., says, “As [Otellini] came into power, Intel tried to become a more aggressive marketing company.” Otellini has called for a consumer orientation.

But it’s a tough transition and lots of charlatans who would be happy to help. I did a project for a company, one dominated by engineers, and I watched in astonishment as they had called in a corporate culture guru who was there to help make them more sensitive to the consumer. The guru’s “idea” was that these engineers needed to be more empathic, intuitive and feminine.

Oi! Why is it that marketing types keep insisting that the secret of consumer centricity is to move from the left brain to the right brain, from rationality to intuition, from pragmatism to dreaminess, from maleness to femaleness.

In fact, there is no important difference between the way marketers and engineers think. The best ones are identical. Both of them like to go to the edge of what we know and peer over. Both marketers and engineers are, to use the famous phrase of Levi-Strauss, “searching after that other message,” the one not now implicit in the code.

Contrary to popular opinion, engineers may be more creative than marketers. They move from orthodoxy to creativity without a second’s thought. No need to urge these people to ‘think outside the box.” They spend their lives there. Or, as my client said with, anxious disapproval of her engineering colleagues, “Every time I live the room, they start building a machine.” Precisely, machines is how they think. I’ve also worked with HP engineers and they were Teflon, sliding between ideas with not a trace of effort or difficulty.

But, finally, there is a challenge for Intel here. To be consumer centric, they must add new rules of discovery. It’s still necessary to make chips go faster. (Though, God knows, this should be enough. IBM is promising a chip called “Cell” that performs 16 trillion mathematical operations a second. Yes, ‘trillion.”) It’s now necessary to find out what the consumer wants to do with this extraordinary processing power. The living room may be the new competitive objective, but it is also from an engineering point of view terra incognito.

What is happening in the living room cannot be coxed from a slide rule, or its latter day equivalent. It cannot be surmised from our own living room. It must be found out, and this means leaving the rationalities of the lab. Now it’s necessary to step off orthodoxy twice, once from technological edge AND again from the domestic edge. The first takes us into the realm of pure technical possibility. The second into the digital home the consumer is in the process of creating.

Forget left brain and right brain, rationality and intuition, engineers are plenty lateral enough. But they must now factor in the end user and this mean taking up residence in the consumer’s life, or at least the consumer’s neighborhood, or at least paddling by from time to time in the ethnographer’s dinghy.

This is another way of saying that rocket science just got a little more difficult. Consumer centricity requires of wedding of the engineer’s creativity with the consumer’s creativity. Not so very difficult, but it is something that requires a substantial change in the present rules of engagement.

Can Intel do it? If they can make itself a global leader in semiconductors and creates revenues of more than $30 billion a year, I guess the answer has to be yes. The only thing that can screw things up is the advice of a marketing consultant.

References

Bulkeley, William M. 2004. IBM to Unveil a Powerful Chip for Home-Entertainment Market. Wall Street Journal. November 29, 2004. (for Zieber quote)

Markoff, John. 2004. The Disco Ball of Failed Hopes and Other Tales From Inside Intel. New York Times, November 29, 2004. (all other quotes and details, gratefully acknowledged) here

Sanctuary is flourishing where other music labels are not. The secret: they buy up artists like Morrissey and Iron Maiden in late career. Bundle enough of these bands together and, hey presto, you’ve got a profit.

Profit is a somewhat novel idea for the rest of the music biz. EMI and Warner Music prefer the blockbuster model. They sign lots of acts and hope that a handful will do well enough to recover costs and make some money. The trouble is that musical tastes have fragmented terribly, so they have to place many more bets than before. Second, music tastes change more quickly, so it’s harder and harder to pick the winners. As labels are finding it out, the hits no longer always pay for the misses.

Could Sanctuary be on to something? They have found a way to get someone else to make the upfront investment and to identify the stars. And they have found a way to extract these modest earners from their labels. Happily, the industry is so hit crazy, it doesn’t work very hard to keep them.

It’s as if Sanctuary has borrowed a page from the beer industry. The legendary Paul Kalmanovitz made a fortune buying up ailing brands, slashing costs, and letting the property “decline profitably.” As long as there is enough altitude left in a brand or band, it isn’t very difficult to get in cheap and ride the thing out.

But Sanctuary has an advantage that the beer biz doesn’t have. Consumers so embrace their favorite bands that they stick tight to them forever. Only death will separate them…and even then they want Morrissey played at the funeral.

Some people in the music biz think this is the new business model. Merck Mercuriadis, the CEO of Sanctuary’s US operations, believes that “most labels will develop around the Sanctuary business model.” Really? If everyone embraced the Sanctuary model, who would fund the search for hits in a fragmented, changeable market? More probably, someone at EMI is going to take a look at Sanctuary and imitate it. EMI will then be in a position to capture the value they have created, and they will have new revenues with which to fund their search for blockbusters.

Plainly, the music biz is reinventing itself, if only in bits and pieces. Eventually it will piece these together to give itself better coverage across the adoption curve. At the front end, they need a better “farm team” system, to pick up and nurture the startups with smaller, more finally placed, investments. (And there must be a little label out there that has solved this problem.) At the back end, they will tack on a Sanctuary system to capture all the value that comes from their early h”bets.”

You’d think they would have figured this out by now. On the other hand, as Steve Jobs points out, they still call themselves record executives.

References

Thompson, Robert. 2004. Sanctuary Plays Its Own Tune. The Financial Post. November 23, 2004, p. FP3.

Walker, Rob. 2003. The marketing of no marketing. New York Times. June 22, 2003.

Princeton University Press, a favorite university press, has just published a book called The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble by Richard Dale.

The South Sea Bubble saw the spectacular rise in the value of the shares of the South Sea Company, and an equally spectacular descent in 1720 when the bubble “burst.” Dale’s book is a chance to understand other moments of market enthusiasm: the run up to the global crash of 1987, the Japanese stock market bubble of the 1980s/90s, the international dot.com boom of the 1990s, and of course the present real estate market.

There is an anthropological way of thinking about economic bubbles. They are after all collective acts of confidence. They are, in fact, self constructing acts of confidence.

They are, to this extent, a little like collecting. The weird thing about collecting, and I know this because I worked in a museum and watched curators build their collections, is how utterly arbitrary they often are. Collectors persuade themselves and their institutions that they “simply” must purchase this painting or that artifact because, well, they have constructed a collection into which it fits. The purchase is, in other words, only compelling and “necessary” because of the previous decisions made by the curator and his/her institution.

They are, to this extent, a little like a Fibonacci spiral. As an innumerate anthropologist, I am the last person to attempt comment on this dazzling little logic, but here’s what strikes me. The Fibonacci scales up by making successively larger versions of itself. Each part reproduces the logic of the last part. In this sense, the system makes itself from itself. Magically, the whole becomes a part of a larger whole which then becomes… Like bubble constructions, we can’t skip forward. We can only move onwards though the mediating step wise process that makes each new moment utterly presupposing of the last moment.

Bubbles, museum collections, and Fibonacci spirals build themselves. They are self constructing and self legitimating. They build the stair case they then ascend. What is proposed in one moment is assumed in the next. “Ok,” says the investor, “if this valuation makes sense then an additional increase is ‘indicated’ (as the medics and the semioticians say)”. Only the spoilsport observes that valuation2 makes sense only because valuation1 is now installed as unexceptional and that valuation1 was, in fact, decidedly exceptional, say, 3 months before and unthinkable 6 months before that.

Most of all, bubbles are self dramatizing. They create a sense of urgency. They draw us in. Before they happen, it feels like they will never happen. I remember asking my father in 1960s Vancouver, why he never invested in property. He looked at me indulgently and said, “nobody makes money in property.” And, after bubbles burst, they are just gone, as we all recall from those months following April 2000. By July 2000, it was almost impossible to construct what we had been thinking 4 months before. We sometimes come across a copy of Fast Company or Wired Magazine, and we go, “wow, this is really world’s away.” Actually, it was just a few years ago.

The spirals and, in some circumstances, the museum collections, go on forever. But bubbles burst. Real bubbles burst because, I am guessing here, scale exceeds surface tension (or something). But economic bubbles begin to come undone for other reasons. And for every empirical case, there must be lots and lots of these interacting with such intensity and dynamism that you would have to be Weber to follow it all. But there is a larger, simpler, puzzle. Something, some process, makes us release ourselves and the collectivity from believing in the bewitching logic of the spiral. One moment, the bubble makes perfect sense. The next moment, “no, we don’t believe in this at all.”

Anthropology is about the mechanics of belief. It has to be because all culture is constructed, consensual, and yet open even to cataclysmic change. In sum, bubbles are a very nice opportunity for anthropology to make itself useful to the field of economics. And if anthropologists such clueless, world renouncing, nitwits, we would have a vast body of scholarship on this very question. But of course they are, so we don’t.

For more on the South Sea Company, see the treatment from the Erasmus School of Economics page here

For an elegant demonstration of the Fibonacci spiral, go here.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Sam Chun, Annie Lewison, and J.S. McCracken.

Yesterday, over at Café Hayek, Don Boudreaux noted the work of the Yale economist William Nordhaus and his finding that:

innovators capture a mere 2.2% of the total “surplus” from innovation. (The total surplus of innovation is, roughly speaking, the total value to society of innovation above the cost of producing innovations.)

Boudreaux notes:

“The smallness of this figure is astounding. If it is anywhere close to being an accurate estimate, the implication is that “society” pays a paltry $2.20 for every $100 worth of welfare it enjoys from innovating activities.”

He asks: “Why do innovators work so cheaply?” But his answers, excessive optimism and the illusory lure of big winnings, don’t seem to me to tell the whole story.

Doesn’t this turn on the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards? It is fun to make stuff up. More to the point, making stuff up is its own reward.

Anthropologists spend a lot of time talking to people who think in the well-worn groves supplied by culture. George Bernard Shaw said: “Most people would rather die than think. Most do.” But every so often, anthropologists run across people who are mad keen to beat their way out of the received assumptions and the defining ideas for their culture.

These are the innovators. Innovators love innovating. They look at the “road closed” signs posted by culture and drive right through them. They like to crawl into the Platonic cave and say, ‘that can’t be right.”

Maybe, it’s the sheer excitement of going “where no man has gone before.” Maybe it’s a willful, contrarian, anarchic wish to defy convention. Maybe it’s the sheer pleasure of building a bridge as we go, in real time, with no net, with the clear knowledge that we have no knowledge. This is intellectual weightlessness. It’s an opportunity, for a brief moment, to escape the gravitational pull of culture. For a moment, we exist “out”…of culture, convention, the body, and our minds.

For innovators, this moment is its own reward. I figure this is why Xerox captured so little of the value they created. The egg heads were running the shop, and they were already very nicely compensated. They were the first ones to ‘think” a Graphical User Interface. Let someone else, at Apple and then still more belatedly, at Microsoft, figure out the details. Let some one else take it to market. And, yes, let someone else reap the “rewards.” The innovator has already taken his or her cut.

I have a test for my proposition. (This is rare for an anthropologist, so let me pause for a moment of self congratulation.) Let us canvas the winners of the Nobel prize and give them this choice. They must choose between the moment of their “innovation” and all the credit that came to them as a result of the innovation: riches, prestige and the Nobel prize itself. The additional condition: if they take the Nobel prize, they will be prevented from engaging in innovative thought ever again. We will put a Denver boot on their brain.

I am prepared to bet virtually every winner would turn down the prize for the chance to think again. For someone who has tasted the joys of making stuff up, anything else would be a torment and the end of the great joy of life. Most innovators would innovate for room and board. They are thrilled, and a little surprised, to discover that a university or a corporation is prepared actually to pay them.

“2.2% of the total surplus of the innovation? Great. Put it over there. Got a moment? See, I have this idea…”

References

Boudreaux’s post here

Fox, Richard G. 1991. For a Nearly New Cultural History. in Recapturing Anthropology. editor Richard G. Fox, 93-113. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

With a hat tip to Tyler Cowen for the lead here