The chapter on how real estate agents and the KKK are similar...

October 3, 2022 9:33 AM

Introducing the Airport Book Harm Index
Type/Intensity of harm: When the book does harm, how bad is it? Who is harmed? And how are they harmed?
Influence/Scope: How many people read this book or were directly exposed to its contents? How influential was the book on society? Did it spawn other books in its harmful image?
Persistence: How long was the book able to do its harm?
posted by spamandkimchi (46 comments total)

I'm appreciating Hobbes' response to someone posting The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman: "lmao why does this cover look like it's Left Behind."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:43 AM on October 3, 2022 [10 favorites]

my favorite quote on this topic is from Maciej Cegłowski

The whole genre reminds me of the the wooly business books one comes across at airports ("Management secrets of Gengis Khan", the "Lexus and the Olive Tree") that milk a bad analogy for two hundred pages to arrive at the conclusion that people just like the author are pretty great.



posted by lalochezia at 9:48 AM on October 3, 2022 [26 favorites]

I really like John Warner and this article, but I want to argue with this a little bit:

It’s a little hard to gauge [harm caused by the book] because the worst thing that happens if you follow the precepts of The Secret is disappointment that the universe does not manifest that new car you wanted to much.

No; the worst thing that happens if you follow the precepts of The Secret is that you start to feel judgmental and contemptuous of people who are poor, unhealthy, or unlucky. I think most people are not reprehensible assholes, and don't consciously think, "Ah, this person who is going through cancer and a divorce must have caused it by thinking bad thoughts," but even good people get uncomfortable around suffering that doesn't have an easy fix, and The Secret in effect acts as a mechanism for validating that discomfort.

There is a whole shameful lineage of books from Think and Grow Rich on forward that draw from the Christian Science / New Thought "you can change the world with your thoughts and you can avoid sickness by having the right beliefs," tradition, so I don't necessarily want to put too much of the blame on The Secret specifically, but it is indeed pretty harmful.
posted by Jeanne at 9:58 AM on October 3, 2022 [112 favorites]

I left so many likes in that thread when it was first out... Will totally cop to buying Blink but in my defence I was in college or just about. But between that and Tipping Point i got a measure of the guy and i used to consider him just plain entertainment, but not actually harmful.

These days... Well, you know if your city has those Books on The Move-type libraries in malls and such (where you're free to pick up as well as leave behind books), and I was going to return a book (first Camus novel I've ever read) as well as add one more and I nearly got rid of Blink but then i felt bad. Maybe I'll print and attach a critique or something, heh.
posted by cendawanita at 10:03 AM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm not entirely convinced The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet is an airport book--who the hell was reading a diet book in public, on a plane, in 1978?

It might be a little early to give the Airport Book Harm Index prize to Hillbilly Elegy, but let's check back on it in a few years.
posted by box at 10:05 AM on October 3, 2022 [17 favorites]

I tend to disagree that the Freakonomics is a big reason why we tend to view issues through an economics lens, although maybe there was a sea change that happened around the time of its publication that I just don't really recognize because it feels like we've always tended to view things from that kind of perspective in my (45-year-old) lifetime.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:24 AM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]

I'm not entirely convinced The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet is an airport book--who the hell was reading a diet book in public, on a plane, in 1978?

It makes sense that it would have been - sales numbers for diet books in that period were bananas (I mean, plus ça change), and I'm old enough to remember seeing it for sale at supermarket checkouts. And definitely front-and-centre at bookstores and magazine stands.

I got kind of curious about the numbers it was actually selling...so, just grabbing one example, on the week of April 8, 1979, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet was number one on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, outselling Christina Crawford's Mommie Dearest and Erma Bombeck's If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? -- both of which were massive bestsellers at the time.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:26 AM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

> I tend to disagree that the Freakonomics is a big reason why we tend to view issues through an economics lens\

I think the success of the Freakonomics is a result of the neoliberal turn, not the cause of it. Had we in the West not being living under neoliberal governments for 20-30 years by the time the book was published in 2005, I find it hard to imagine it having the popular success that it did, if it would have been written at all without those previous decades of condition.
posted by asnider at 11:17 AM on October 3, 2022 [8 favorites]

By the way the Maintenance Phase episode on the Scarsdale Diet is pretty good!
posted by emjaybee at 11:18 AM on October 3, 2022 [10 favorites]

Ugh, The Secret. Some years ago, my great fomer employer & dear friend was dying of cancer. A "helpful" client brought by a copy of the book. I know he meant well, but fuuuuck you for implying that negative thoughts caused this. Definitely the worst personally, if not societally.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 11:34 AM on October 3, 2022 [13 favorites]

I think Warner is underselling Malcolm Gladwell’s harms here. If it were just the 10,000 hours rule and other similar Ted-Talky self help ideas, I’d agree that he’s simping for the status quo but not uniquely bad. However—the thing I remember most from The Tipping Point is Gladwell’s defense of the idea of broken windows policing. Broken windows theory and its obsessive focus on “quality of life” crimes breeds racism by positing that poor neighborhoods that have been systematically ignored look run-down because “those people” who live there don’t care about their environment. It brings us obsessive right wing news coverage of every last retail theft in San Francisco at a time when violent crime is falling nationwide. It’s lines of cops so focused on stopping fare evasion that they can’t catch a mass shooter right under their noses in the subway. It’s trashing homeless encampments because they look dirty and anything that doesn’t conform to rich people aesthetics clearly breeds crime.

I don’t even remember much else about The Tipping Point, but Gladwell is dangerous and reactionary for popularizing broken windows alone.
posted by ActionPopulated at 11:52 AM on October 3, 2022 [51 favorites]

I'm glad they went with the more male-coded choice as worse than the more female-coded one. But I can't unintertwine Gladwell and Freakonomics enough to judge which is truly more corrosive; I feel like they just feed into the same people's just-so/it's-everyone-else-who's-wrong pathologies in an ever-widening gyre, like how you look at one crappy book on Amazon (without even buying it!) and the algorithm decides that no, you really do want to read nothing but self-published novels about dudes with big guns for like two months.
posted by Etrigan at 11:53 AM on October 3, 2022 [5 favorites]

n-thing the Gladwell, if only because so many people in my circles spout stuff like the 10k hours or whatnot, but... I recently started listening to the Michael Lewis "Against The Rules" podcast, thought "this is really good, everyone should listen to it", then noted the collaboration with Gladwell, and now I'm re-evaluating everything I thought it was telling me.

It's a little niche, but I in software I think Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software and quite a few of the various "Agile" books probably also deserve some place on this list.
posted by straw at 12:07 PM on October 3, 2022 [14 favorites]

Has The Secret's "Law of Attraction" been validated by the latest discoveries in Quantum Physics? According to this professor at MIT's Center for Theoretical Physics: "Get the hell out of my office."

posted by straight at 12:11 PM on October 3, 2022 [42 favorites]

I recently started listening to the Michael Lewis "Against The Rules" podcast.

I don't know the podcast, but based on reading most of his books, I would say that Michael Lewis is about as good a nonfiction writer as you can be when you keep telling the same story over and over.
posted by box at 12:16 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

The amazing thing about Freakonomics is that people who followed their advice when everything was teetering on the edge took an absolute bath in the 2008 collapse, and yet after a few years in eclipse when I never heard about them, they somehow rehabilitated themselves.
posted by jamjam at 12:19 PM on October 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

I once had a therapist recommend The Secret to me. That was our first and last appointment.

I'm just glad that Business Secrets of the Pharoahs didn't make it to the list, because I learned so much from Mark Crorigan.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:27 PM on October 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

Freakanomics definitely feels more like an archetypal example of a kind of thing than an originator of that thing but one could say that about a lot of these.
posted by atoxyl at 12:52 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

The cause/effect of Freakonomics or The Lexus and the Olive Tree on the real world is hard to figure, but they probably did make it comfortable for a lot of well-educated and more-or-less well meaning liberals (and journalists) to stick with the economic consensus.

When Freakonomics came out they did a pretty good job marketing it through "science bloggers" in addition to prestige liberal media. I was excited to read it but at that time had a no hardbacks rule on buying new books, and it was always checked out from the library.

Buy the time I could have gotten my hands on it I'd become aware of that the data-driven approach wasn't leading to correct conclusions. I have more tolerance for contrarian takes than the average MeFite, and 20 years ago I had far more than I did now. But what's the point of reading a book full of smug "well, actually" points if you're going to become less right about stuff?

So I still haven't read it. At this point it fits so clearly into the Gladwell/Pinker mode of lightweight analysis, I'm a little embarrassed I was energetically trying to get a copy. Far from the worst opinion I entertained, I guess.

There's plenty of criticism of the book on the merits; this old piece by Dan Davies on the contraria persona struck by the authors is fun though : Rules for Contrarians: #1 Do Not Whine. That is All.
posted by mark k at 12:54 PM on October 3, 2022 [11 favorites]

one could Argue that Trump’sThe Art of the Deal Is the most impactful, given that in made him appear competent enough to get a business focused TV show, which in term made him look like a decisive leader enough to get elected?
posted by CostcoCultist at 1:01 PM on October 3, 2022 [14 favorites]

I mean, real estate agents and the klan do both have histories of wanting to keep residential neighborhoods segregated, so maybe these freakonomics guys are onto something
posted by Jon_Evil at 1:14 PM on October 3, 2022 [10 favorites]

Jeanne, my mother bought 'The Secret' and I read it as a child - there is an anecdote about a gay man that ought to disgust any member of a group facing discrimination where he is instructed to blame his own mindset for others' actions towards him.
posted by Selena777 at 1:23 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Saxon Kane: me too! Bet it wasn't even the same therapist.
posted by minsies at 1:25 PM on October 3, 2022

It might be a little early to give the Airport Book Harm Index prize to Hillbilly Elegy, but let's check back on it in a few years.

^^^^^THIS^^^^^^^
posted by thivaia at 1:44 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

> I don’t even remember much else about The Tipping Point, but Gladwell is dangerous and reactionary for popularizing broken windows alone.

What's worse is that the broken windows theory was already being questioned and largely disproven by the time Gladwell brought it back into the mainstream consciousness.

Many large US cities saw violent crime drop at rates nearly the same as NYC did, even when they did nothing remotely like "broken windows policing" and by the late 90s/early 00s, academics were beginning to suggest it was not effective (it just looked like it was, due to correlations that largely disappeared when you looked at the US as a whole rather than just focusing on NYC). Meanwhile, Gladwell comes along in 2000 and says, "Hey! Look at this great and very successful thing! Never mind those ivory tower nerds saying it probably doesn't actually make a difference!"

I think you're right that Gladwell is largely responsible for it continuing to be implemented in NYC, in particular, for longer than it otherwise would have been. And, of course, it largely morphed into the even worse "stop and frisk" policing that is now common in much of the US and Canada.

Ironically, I think the Freakonomics guys would later say broken windows policing was garbage and that the drop in violent crime correlated to greater legal access to abortion: those children who would have been "unwanted" and neglected, but who were instead aborted and never came to be, would have been coming of age around the time violent crime rates were dropping. Fewer abused and neglected children, allegedly, meant fewer maladjusted adults committing violent crimes a couple decades later.
posted by asnider at 1:59 PM on October 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

I mean, anything by Friedman wins this handily because Friedman has had far too much political influence. This is the man who is always wrong

Gladwell probably doesn't have even a tenth of the influence Friedman has, though I agree his "broken glass" defense is reprehensible. I use his 10.000 hours all the time. Before his book came out (and after, too), I'd say to my students: do the right thing and the right thing will happen, and in my experience as a teacher, there is a 100% correlation between practice and succes. No other factor is as significant. I'm not saying it works for all subjects, how would I know? But it definitely works for the subjects I teach.
If you don't have the 10.000 hours, and my students don't have 10.000 hours for my courses, the sense that doing the stuff is important still works. To be Mozart, you need 10.000 hours, but to be a very good engineering graduate, you may need 1.000 hours of my course and 4.000 hours of math, 3.000 hours of programming etc.
posted by mumimor at 2:16 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

Putting in an argument for the Freakanomics guys: I'm taking URBP 214, Management of Public Agencies, right now, in grad school. And the teacher assigned Think Like A Freak, a policy focused sequel to Freakanomics. So while The Secret might just be influencing your Aunt Gladys, Freakanomics is honestly shaping ideas about how bureaucracy and government agencies should be operated.

I'm also mad for getting a bad grade because my book review was three pages of violently debunking the Freakanomics guys. These are the people who started the trend of making job applications cumbersome and onerous so that 'you can screen out the people not interested in the job'! They've made my life hell as an underemployed person for the past decade! MAY A THOUSAND SCORPIONS PARADE ACROSS THEIR EARHOLES WHENEVER THEY SLEEP! DAMN THEM, DAMN THEM STRAIGHT TO HELL!
posted by LeRoienJaune at 2:21 PM on October 3, 2022 [43 favorites]

Haven’t read the article past the intro yet, so will put in my prediction here: “The Bell Curve”. Be back shortly to let you know how I did.
posted by TedW at 3:35 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

Hmm; perhaps they didn’t sell my choice in airports; who knows? I will say “The Scarsdale Diet” was pretty harmful (if indirectly) to it’s author.
posted by TedW at 3:39 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

After reading comments here and on the FPP page, I have to say that “The Art of the Deal” and “Hillbilly Elegy” are definitely strong contenders. I’m also starting to see a trend here.
posted by TedW at 3:43 PM on October 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

I didn't buy it at an airport bookstore, instead it was on Amazon's Kindle store, but several years ago, someone I admire and trust suggested reading the book Choose Yourself by James Altucher. A lot of it is bland, self-help crap, but some of the examples of "success' that Altucher used pissed me off. The guy who bulk-bought laptops for $200 and sold them, rent-to-own, for $20 a week is what pushed me over the edge. That's exploitive as fuck, and even if the guy's bringing in $300,000 a month, it's still a disgusting and shameful way to do it. You don't need to stomp on other people and exploit them financially just to be a "success" and I would rather have my morals than make $300,000 a month.

At least the eBook was only a dollar, so I didn't feel completely ripped off.
posted by SansPoint at 3:44 PM on October 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

Pleased to see The Game here. Misogyny-for-profit wrapped in unearned self-adoration is the heart and soul of Trumpism, and pretty much everything else stinking up our world today.
posted by armeowda at 3:50 PM on October 3, 2022 [6 favorites]

Just re-read Barbara Ehrenreich's takedown of Who Moved My Cheese. Now that's someone who used her contrarian powers for good instead of evil.
posted by latkes at 5:37 PM on October 3, 2022 [16 favorites]

Design Patterns

How To Get Halfway To Ordinary Functional Programming With Twice As Many Keystrokes In the Totalitarian Object-Oriented World of Java
posted by mubba at 5:46 PM on October 3, 2022 [9 favorites]

Clash of Civilizations (does this count for the genre?)
posted by brendano at 7:04 PM on October 3, 2022

The amazing thing about Freakonomics is that people who followed their advice when everything was teetering on the edge took an absolute bath in the 2008 collapse

Were the Freakonomics guys really giving out financial advice? Ouch.

I've only read the first book, as I've been led to believe they declined in quality (and the good parts are repetitive), and it was a long time ago now, but I don't really remember anything especially toxic about it, above and beyond what you'd consider toxic about any Econ 101 class, anyway. A little 'edgelord', I guess, in terms of clearly picking examples that were likely to get people riled up, but it's not like anything in the book was new.

But I followed the Freakonomics book almost immediately with The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street (itself arguably an "Airport Book" from 1988), which is all about Gilded Age barons pillaging each other by manipulating the stock market and otherwise engaging in what we'd now call "fraud", so maybe that was just a particularly effective antidote to the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Recommended if you can score a copy at a used-book store.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:46 PM on October 3, 2022

Were the Freakonomics guys really giving out financial advice? Ouch.


That’s a good question. I was thinking of the Freakonomics people and the Motley Fool people as part of the same axis, and though that seems to be true now, it may not have been back in 2008 (The linked review was published in 2007, but was "updated" in 2016. Who knows what it was like originally).
posted by jamjam at 10:14 PM on October 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

No mention of Jordan Peterson, one the most successful reactionary liars for money and the most prominent alt-right pipeline of these past how many years now?
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:55 PM on October 3, 2022 [11 favorites]

The Bell Curve was my answer.

Not an "airport book"? (Or just before the memories of many?)
posted by MrJM at 6:18 AM on October 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Secret is a terrible book.

I remember my hairdresser telling me, when I first became chronically ill, "oh, you can stop being ill by just DECIDING TO STOP BEING ILL. I've been reading The Secret..."

It justifies ableism. :(
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:12 AM on October 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

I've always thought of airport books as putatively easy-to-read in addition to popular. Certainly everything ilisted has a kind of breezy superificiality. So The Bell Curve was a big seller and harmful but not an airport book.

And Peterson AFAIK doesn't have one book that's hit the stratosphere in the way some of these others have. His adherents seem to be on YouTube instead.
posted by mark k at 8:22 AM on October 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think Peterson's 10 Rules for Life or whatever it's called is not especially dangerous, it's more the fact that Peterson, via YouTube, has become a gateway to the alt-right, white male radicalization pipeline.

From everything I've heard, the book itself is just a bunch of mediocre self-help (admittedly, some of it is bad, like not trying to change the world until you get your own life in order, which is essentially just a self-helpy way of saying to maintain the status quo unless you're literally perfect). Read in isolation of the larger Jordan Peterson persona it's a mediocre book that probably doesn't do much harm and might even help some young men who feel adrift in the world; the problem is that reading it in isolation of JBP's online persona is probably impossible so fans of the book will almost certainly be pulled into his pseudo-culty YouTube channel and the accompanying alt-right pipeline.
posted by asnider at 8:54 AM on October 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

And, of course, it largely morphed into the even worse "stop and frisk" policing that is now common in much of the US and Canada.


FYI stop and frisk has been ruled unconstitutional in the United States. So now the police have to invent a plausible pretext for the stop. Chicago recently had an alderman openly admit that the police department's push for a curfew for unaccompanied minors to be imposed by the mayor and council was to provide this pretext to get around constitutional protections.
posted by srboisvert at 2:09 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was thinking of the Freakonomics people and the Motley Fool people as part of the same axis, and though that seems to be true now, it may not have been back in 2008

Oh. Yeah, the Motley Fool folks went from giving out pretty reasonable personal finance advice in the early 2000s (take advantage of your employer 401k match, fully fund your Roth, invest in low-cost index funds, etc.) to going full-bore with stock-picking "newsletters" and other crap that's demonstrably bad advice for nearly everyone. I'm not sure what happened to them. They were an Ask Metafilter fan favorite for a while, and now I feel a bit dirty about ever having linked to their site.

I feel like there's a story there, but I've never heard exactly what drove the change in tone.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:19 AM on October 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I feel like there's a story there, but I've never heard exactly what drove the change in tone.

Probably the same thing that drove Nate Silver's shift from "Look at the data, stop listening to hot takes" to "So here's my latest hot take that is totally unsupported by data" -- there's only so many times you can say "Look at the data" or "Invest in low-cost index funds" before people just drift away. Not that they stop listening, but they've absorbed the lesson, so they don't engage, they stop visiting the website, they probably unsubscribe from the newsletter, and it feels like your site is dying (and if you're owned by someone else, they definitely start asking why your site is dying, or at least not continually growing like they want it to.

"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" might be from a Batman movie, but it's a pretty decent summary of a lot of iconoclasts' arcs.
posted by Etrigan at 11:36 AM on October 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Michael Hobbes has turned this into a podcast.
posted by Etrigan at 6:14 AM on November 3, 2022 [4 favorites]