Steve Reads

I’ve been trying to think for a while about what niche I could fill as a writer. I’ve got a decent-enough background in economics and statistics that I think I could introduce those topics to nontechnical audiences pretty well.

But now it occurs to me: I should just follow along behind Jonah Lehrer or Malcolm Gladwell or Chris Anderson or whoever, watch what they’re writing about, then say exactly the opposite.

It’s not that these fellows are entirely wrong, but it’s that they seem to follow the science news cycle. Someone comes up with an idea which is valid within an appropriately circumscribed domain, subject to qualifications, hedge hedge hedge. Then someone else declares that this thing is the greatest thing and explains everything. Behavioral economics has gone this way of late; I think everything went downhill when people other than Richard Thaler tried to write about it. Then there’s evolutionary psychology, everyone’s favorite brand of universal explanation. Or take smaller trends, like the fetish for power laws or the “long tail”. These are all fine ideas, and when combined with other ideas they’re part of the toolbox. In the hands of popularizers, though, they often get unmoored from reality.

I would like to be the sort of popularizer at whom academic experts don’t roll their eyes. This might be a hard niche to squeeze into, though: “that thing you’re excited about isn’t very exciting after all” isn’t the best pitch for a book.