A Book by Its Cover

February 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I have absolutely no faith in my own visual sense, and I have great admiration for people who can present ideas in purely visual form. So I was curious to see the results of The Book Design Review poll for favorite book cover of 2008.

My own favorite got runner-up. (You can find all the entries here. )


I haven’t read the book. I’d never even heard of it. (I assume it’s a Kafka version of Alain de Botton’s 1997 How Proust Can Change Your Life). But I like the visual joke.

Long ago, Harper’s agreed to publish my book on compulsive gamblers as part of a series of academic books they hoped might have crossover potential. The editor called one day to tell me that the book had already gone to the art department so it was really too late, but did I have any ideas for the cover. No, I said, as long as it’s not some socialist realist thing with cards and dice and horses floating around on it.

She called back a day or two later to say that the art department had come through with exactly what I had feared. She sent it back, and they tried again. I wasn’t delighted with the results, but
I wasn’t in a position to be picky, and I didn’t have any better ideas.


It seems to me that book covers have gotten better over the decades. In bookstores, I often find myself drawn to books just because of the title and the cover design. I want to buy half the books on the display table.

People in the business are far more critical than I am. The guy at Book Design Review posts nine different covers for recent releases of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (it’s in the public domain, and several publishers are trying to cash in on the success of the movie). Most of them, he concludes, are “pretty horrible,” and the commenters agree.

Steeler Sociology - again

January 31, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the Freakonomics blog, Steven Dubner lists “Ten Reasons to Like the Pittsburgh Steelers.” (He doesn’t say anything about liking them minus the six-and-a-half or seven points.) Reasons like

• they’re a family team (still owned by the Rooneys)
• they’re a small-market team (Pittsburgh population – 350,000)
• they’re named for the work the city does (er, did)
• they had a nutty, lovable radio guy (Myron Cope)*

and so on.

But here, for sociologists, is one more: Head coach Mike Tomlin, when he was an undergrad at William and Mary, majored in sociology.

(Although Dubner is a Steelers fan, he writes, “The Steelers may not be ‘America’s team’ ”; he doesn’t challenge the Cowboys’ claim to that title. I guess Dubner didn’t read this SocioBlog post from two seasons ago.)

*Dubner says Cope’s voice “sounded like gravel and Yiddish tossed in a blender.” But in fact, Cope had the purest Pittsburgh accent you'd ever want to hear (if you ever wanted to hear a Pittsburgh accent).

C. Wright Mills Orders Another Cosmopolitan

January 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I passed the night crying while he berated me for – of all things – not supporting his quest to play some college drinking game.

So writes Laney, the former girlfriend of a young Wall Streeter after her introduction to F.U.B.A.R. She calls Megan, her best friend, who has a similar tale of woe. Megan had recently learned that her parents were getting divorced.

The news was devastating and I justifiably fell apart a bit.. My FBF (Finance guy Boyfriend) . . . just couldn’t deal. . . .. A deal that he had been working on for the last year had fallen through, so he couldn’t talk about my parents’ divorce. He needed to go home and catch up on Gossip Girl (seriously). . . Fortunately that’s when Megan called to talk me off the ledge.

It’s unlikely that Laney and Megan, crying and on the ledge, respectively, had been reading C. Wright Mills.

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals.

Nevertheless, the young women get together for “two hours of psycho-analysis and brunch at Market Table,” and emerge with this rather succinct version of the sociological imagination.

Our FBFs’ recent bad behavior and sudden lack of basic manners had nothing to do with us, it was the recession.

Mills: “They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct.”

Laney and Megan: “We felt our relationships were being victimized by the economy and there was nothing we could do to stop it.”

Mills’s response to the crisis he saw was a commitment to political action and “intellectual craftsmanship” (to social science and writing). Laney and Megan take a similar path. According to the story in Tuesday’s Times, they formed a support group, Dating a Banker Anonymous. And. . . .

Not knowing what else to do, we did what enraged yet articulate people have done since the beginning of time. We started a blog.

You can find the blog here.

Drinkikng, Death, Discontinuity

January 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last summer, some college presidents suggested that legislatures reconsider the drinking age. They didn’t come right out and say, “Let’s lower it to 18,” but that’s the way their statement was interpreted, and they did point out some of the problems that arise when it’s illegal for college student to drink.

But lowering the age may also have some negative effects. Like death.

In an article in the premier issue of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Christopher Carpenter and Carlos Dopkin present data on alcohol, age, and death. The article is “The Effect of Alcohol Consumption on Mortality: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from the Minimum Drinking Age.” Their graph shows the discontinuities.
Laws make a difference. There’s a big jump in drinking once kids hit the legal age (the red line in the graph). And drinking makes a difference. The there’s also a jump in death at age 21, and most of those deaths are from automobile accidents, suicide, and other causes likely involving alcohol.

By the way, for those of us who can’t quite give up the quaint and antiquated notion that economics is about money, the journal also has the following articles:

• “Many Children Left Behind? Textbooks and Test Scores in Kenya”
• “Sticking with Your Vote: Cognitive Dissonance and Political Attitudes”
• “Separated at Girth: US Twin Estimates of the Effects of Birth Weight”

That still leaves a majority of the articles (six of ten) that involve what we used to call economic factors.

Hat tip to Harold Pollack at The American Prospect.