➻ The Portfolio Javelin blog has recently pointed us to two additions to big conversations happening in our world—one in the publishing world and one in the world at large. First, Brooke Carey pointed us to Cory Doctorow’s excellent article chronicling his understanding of the bookselling trade that attempts to help authors answer a vital question about marketing their book: Why Should Anyone Care? In the article, he writes about the difficulties he had in his first foray into self-publishing, and how much more work it required:

It doesn’t really matter how much time you spend hanging around bookstores or browsing online stores, until you’ve marketed a book, you don’t really know how to market a book.

I certainly didn’t.

Oh, when I launched my DIY short story collection With a Little Help, I figured I could deploy all the stuff I’d done when my other books had been published by mainstream publishers, the stuff that had given my books a little push to get them out of the midlist and into wider circles of attention and discussion. I knew I’d have to do some of the stuff my publisher had done, but like everyone doing something complicated for the first time, I dramatically underestimated how much work this would be. It’s not impossible, and it’s not horrible work—it’s challenging, exciting stuff, but it’s incredibly time consuming and it can be tough (and expensive—sending out hundreds of review copies ain’t cheap, but it was worth it, if only for the major feature in The Wall Street Journal this garnered me).

Doctorow is always experimenting in publishing, and is very generous in sharing his experience in and advice about it. If you’re an author looking to enter the field*, you should definitely look into the many things he’s written about those experiences. Even if you’re just a lover of books, you’ll want to check out this article just to read about his experience in and passion for books and bookstores.

*If you’re looking for a reason to finally write that book, Stephanie Chandler has for 20 of them for you.

➻ Next up, Courtney Young pointed us to a provocative piece Douglas Rushkoff wrote for CNN.com that asks Are jobs obsolete? The choice quote from that piece:

The Industrial Age was largely about making … jobs as menial and unskilled as possible. Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and laborers more replaceable. Now that we’re in the digital age, we’re using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, I have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn’t this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Rushkoff’s also sat down with The Wall Street Journal‘s Dennis Berman recently to ask, Does America Really Need More Jobs? I agree with Ms. Young that “It’s a worthwhile question, and not just one for consideration in freshman Marxism seminars,” but Rush Limbaugh just wants to know who this Douglas Rushkoff guy is.

➻ And speaking of that old bogeyman Marx, Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto, recently asked his readers Was Marx Right? After looking at some of Marx’s critiques in detail, he writes:

Marx’s critiques seem, today, more resonant than we might have guessed. Now, here’s what I’m not suggesting: that Marx’s prescriptions (you know the score: overthrow, communalize, high-five, live happily ever after) for what to do about the maladies above were desirable, good, or just. History, I’d argue, suggests they were anything but. Yet nothing’s black or white — and while Marx’s prescriptions were poor, perhaps, if we’re prepared to think subtly, it’s worthwhile separating his diagnoses from them.

Because the truth might just be that the global economy is in historic, generational trouble, plagued by problems the orthodoxy didn’t expect, didn’t see coming, and doesn’t quite know what to do with. Hence, it might just be that if we’re going to turn this crisis upside down, we’re going to have to think outside the big-box store, the McMansion, the dead-end McJob, the bailout, the super-bonus, and the share price.

This makes sense to me, and I think we should be able to look at the entire breadth of economic critique without the rancor of our current partisan lenses—we should be able to see Smith and Marx simultaneously, read Keynes and Hayek together, consider both Paul Krugman and the Wall Street Journal editorial page with and open mind. What we’re looking for are solutions and a new way forward, and everyone has something to contribute. As Seth Godin wrote in Linchpin:

(Karl Marx and Adam Smith Agreed)

Both great social economists said the same thing: There are two teams, management and labor. Management owns the machines, labor follows the rules.

Management wins when it can get the most work for the least pay, and the more controlled the output, the better. Smith thought this was a good thing. Marx saw this as a lousy deal for labor and insisted that the entire structure be forcibly abandoned.

What if there were no longer only two sides? Not just capital versus labor, but a third team, one that straddles the elements of both? I think there’s a huge opportunity for a third kind of participant, a linchpin, and now there is an opportunity to change all the rules that we’ve lived with all our lives. There is a shortage of this third kind of worker, and that shortage means that the market needs you desperately. The con game is ending, at least for people passionate enough to do something about it.

Okay, I’m done. Sorry for the link tangent.

➻ Getting back to the debate as it’s being played out in our current politics, The Economist looks at the debate between libertarian and neo-classical economists about Social welfare and economic irrationality.

Mike Konczal writes:

One of the more curious behavioral responses is that people hate unemployment. They hate not being part of their productive community, they hate not contributing, they hate the loss of identity that one gets as someone who works. To an economist that’s b-a-n-a-n-a-s. Unemployment should be a pleasant vacation! But, last time I checked, it wasn’t (is that consistent with the latest frontiers in happiness research?).

Mr Konczal is contributing to a discussion that’s kicked up recently over a paper written by libertarian economists Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier, arguing that behavioural economics provides a basis for critiquing government welfare policies. Karl Smith highlighted Mr Caplan’s paper as a serious challenge to his neo-classical economic belief structure; other commentors replied that the paper had no data and no mathematical models; Mr Smith responded that often simple, data-free models can be extremely helpful in posing problems and presenting complex ideas intuitively, and cited the example of Paul Krugman’s famous essay on the babysitting co-op with its crystal-clear workaday picture of how a Keynesian liquidity trap works; Mr Krugman jumped in with his favourite simple, low-on-data papers, including David Hume’s thought experiment “Of the Balance of Trade” and Evsey Domar’s paper grounding slavery and serfdom in land surpluses and labour shortages.

Head on over to the original article, and you’ll find a wealth of additional links in the paragraph I cited above.

➻ It’s all a bit like chasing Winter Ghosts.