Month: April 2014

In a New Scientist series on “stuff,” Alison George outlines the pre-history of property:

By the time modern humans reached Europe around 40,000 years ago there are clear signs of ownership. “You can see notches and marks on various items – the notion of ownership is there,” says Steven Mithen of the University of Reading, UK. But the amount of stuff that people could accumulate was constrained by their nomadic lifestyle, leading some archaeologists to speculate that bags or papooses might have been among our earliest possessions. This changed with the switch to a settled lifestyle. …

In fact, some archaeologists such as Ian Hodder of Stanford University in California argue that societies could not have become complex and hierarchical without an associated “material culture.” This switch to sedentariness drove materialism in another way. Gary Feinman at the University of Illinois in Chicago argues that our urge to accumulate stuff is based on a desire to minimize risk. “When people settled down, they became more susceptible to environmental disaster,” he says. A way to insure against this was to store surplus food – a process that created the need for possessions to gather and hoard, as well as the domestication of animals.

Meanwhile, Michael Bond investigates the psychology of property ownership:

Our ability to imbue things with rich meaning is a universal human trait that develops early in life (see “My blankie!“), and develops as we get older. A 1977 survey of multiple generations of families in Chicago revealed that older people tend to prize objects that spur memories and reflection, whereas younger people value things with multiple uses – like a kitchen table and chairs. That may be the case in the digital era as well. Sociologist Eugene Halton, who conducted the survey, speculates that younger people today might prize their smartphone above all else, but it is unlikely to stay special for long. “Not a lot of people collect their old computers and cellphones as meaningful possessions,” he says.

The inclination to value things we own beyond what others think they are worth is known in psychology as the endowment effect. It explains why we are more likely to buy a coat once we have tried it on, or a car once we have test-driven it – just imagining that something is ours makes it seem more valuable.

In an interview, Allie Sommer explains how her reading habits have shifted since she took a job as an editor at Little, Brown:

I read very differently now than I used to. First, I’m extremely picky. I have to prioritize the books I read since I have so little time to do it, and so I don’t impulse buy anymore. I rely heavily on recommendations from friends, colleagues, and reviewers. Still, I always read the first few pages of a book before I buy it to make sure I’ll be able to get into it. Second, once I’m reading, I often think about how I would have edited the book differently. I get frustrated with stories that feel overlong or don’t deliver on plot the way I’d hoped they would. Third, I never finish a book I’m not enjoying. That’s a huge change for me. I used to think I had to finish every book I started. Now I’ve realized that life is too short to read a bad book — especially when there are so many wonderful books out there waiting to become part of your soul and fundamentally change the way you think about the world.

Sommer also describes what surprised her most about her job:

Everyone thinks that editors get to sit at their desks and read all day. At least, that’s what I thought! Even as an intern, that was mostly my experience. Sadly, that’s not quite how it works. As I mentioned earlier, there are so many other parts of the publishing process we need to manage during the day that reading almost always gets pushed to after hours.

I was also surprised by how much you have to schmooze! There’s lots of networking involved — with authors, agents, editors, and other publicity or industry contacts. There’s always someone you need to meet. I thought in an industry full of bookworms, you could just hole up at your desk and get away with being shy, but that’s just not the way it works. Publishing seems to favor the outgoing (or the shy who are good at faking it!). At a party, you have to train yourself to go up to a group of people you’ve never met and introduce yourself, and shamelessly follow up the next day by email. You also have to cold call or email people you’ve never met and ask them out for lunch. And then when you get to lunch, you have to be able to keep the conversation going. Luckily, people are generally very nice about all this (since they are in the same position), but it can definitely be terrifying at times.

In her new essay collection The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison explores the various ways people connect. In an interview, she discusses how empathy functions on the Internet, describing what she learned from her students while teaching a writing course during the Boston Marathon bombing:

A couple of their essays ended up focusing on what is the role of social media in response to a tragedy, and a lot of interesting issues came up. There was clearly something that rubbed them the wrong way about the sort of outpouring of empathy that comes up on the Internet. Like, one guy had all this beef with the phrase, “Our thoughts and prayers go out,” or something that felt like it was really hollow and trite and what did it mean that it was so easy to offer and that there was no work behind it? And this other girl was taking issue with people who would do things like post photos on Instagram for email listings they’d gotten for charitable donations. Stuff like that.

I feel like when we critique hollow displays of empathy on the Internet, what we’re critiquing is usually some aspect of empathy that is much more deeply entrenched but just made visible.

For example, we’re critiquing the way that whenever we feel empathy, we also feel proud of ourselves. So it starts to feel a little bit dirty or polluted. And so be it, I think there’s something valid in that, if you are thinking about how your empathy makes you look, to the exclusion of actually empathizing or acting on your impulse, that’s misguided and ultimately not that useful. … I like to think there’s something about the mass support that could be comforting, but again the danger is if a tweet becomes a substitute if you live in Boston and instead of donating blood you’re just tweeting about your feelings.

In another interview, Jamison turns to the perils of empathy:

I’m interested in everything that might be flawed or messy about empathy — how imagining other lives can constitute a kind of tyranny, or artificially absolve our sense of guilt or responsibility; how feeling empathy can make us feel we’ve done something good when we actually haven’t. Zizek talks about how “feeling good” has become a kind of commodity we purchase for ourselves when we buy socially responsible products; there’s some version of this inoculation logic — or danger — that’s possible with empathy as well: we start to like the feeling of feeling bad for others; it can make us feel good about ourselves. So there’s a lot of danger attached to empathy: it might be self-serving or self-absorbed; it might lead our moral reasoning astray, or supplant moral reasoning entirely. (See this fantastic piece by Paul Bloom in The New Yorker.)

But do I want to defend it, despite acknowledging this mess? More like: I want to defend it by acknowledging this mess. Saying: Yes. Of course. But yet. Anyway.

A recent report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau suggests that many Americans are being hounded by collectors for debt they may not actually owe:

The CFPB’s “Fair Debt Collection Practices Act” annual report [PDF] shows that nearly 34% of complaints received by the Bureau involve consumers being hounded by collectors for a debt the consumer does not believe is owed. Of those complaints 65% of consumers report the debt is not theirs, and 27% report the debt was paid. The reports notes that in many cases the attempt to collect the debt is not the issue, but rather the calculation of the amount of underlying debt is inaccurate or unfair.

David Dayen delves into why the debt collection industry does this:

Can the debt collection industry be so careless as to continually harass the wrong individuals? The more you learn about how debt collection works, the more you’re surprised that they ever find the right target in the first place. When a consumer sustains a debt, the creditor can either attempt to personally collect it, or sell the debt to one of America’s 4,500 collection agencies. That auction process is completely broken, producing the ultimate in caveat emptor.

“Creditors provide debt buyers with almost no data, no original contract, no backup information,” said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Attorneys. “The records are so poor that sometimes the amount of the debt is wrong too.” In a world of big data, the debt buyer market operates like it’s still the 1970s, where the commodity is merely a spreadsheet full of hints and leads, instead of reliable information about debts.

In the next video from the journalist behind The Bright Continent, she explains how Africans have a different perception of corruption than most Americans do:

Previous Dish on the difficulty measuring worldwide corruption here. In another video from Dayo, she goes on to reject other over-simplistic ways in which the West typically judge African countries:

From the publisher’s description of The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa:

[T]he western focus on governance and foreign aid obscures the individual dynamism and informal social adaptation driving the last decade of African development. Dayo Olopade set out across sub-Saharan Africa to find out how ordinary people are dealing with the challenges they face every day. She found an unexpected Africa: resilient, joyful, and innovative, a continent of DIY changemakers and impassioned community leaders. Everywhere Olopade went, she witnessed the specific creativity born from African difficulty—a trait she began calling kanju. It’s embodied by bootstrapping innovators like Kenneth Nnebue, who turned his low-budget, straight-to-VHS movies into a multi-million dollar film industry known as Nollywood. Or Soyapi Mumba, who helped transform cast-off American computers into touchscreen databases that allow hospitals across Malawi to process patients in seconds. Or Ushahidi, the Kenyan technology collective that crowdsources citizen activism and disaster relief.

The Bright Continent calls for a necessary shift in our thinking about Africa. Olopade shows us that the increasingly globalized challenges Africa faces can and must be addressed with the tools Africans are already using to solve these problems themselves. Africa’s ability to do more with less—to transform bad aid and bad government into an opportunity to innovate—is a clear ray of hope amidst the dire headlines and a powerful model for the rest of the world.

(Archive)