Hudgins Double Book Review: It’s Getting Better All the Time!

[Ed Hudgins]

It’s Getting Better All the Time

Book reviews by Edward Hudgins

Here's my double book review, featured in this week's eSkeptic newsletter, of "Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think," by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler and "Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism," by Robert Zubrin. Hope you enjoy it!

[Brant Gaede]

Getting better for whom/what?

--Brant

I'm not doubting it but there are always exceptions always have been and always will be--one could have written books like these in the context of the ongoing Black Plague of Medieval Europe

[caroljane]

Ed has young children, he needs to be optimistic.

[Ed Hudgins]

Actually, my review of Zubrin's book shows that the philosophy on which the progress that Diamandis and Kotler document needs serious work. That's one reason I did a double review. I might tackle Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined though at 800 pages I really need to find the time, what with my young children taking up all my evenings now!

[Ed Hudgins]

Getting better for whom/what?

--Brant

I'm not doubting it but there are always exceptions always have been and always will be--one could have written books like these in the context of the ongoing Black Plague of Medieval Europe

Guest you'll have to read the review to find out!

Ed

[Brant Gaede]

Getting better for whom/what?

--Brant

I'm not doubting it but there are always exceptions always have been and always will be--one could have written books like these in the context of the ongoing Black Plague of Medieval Europe

Guest you'll have to read the review to find out!

Ed

Done. Very well done. I liked most the short part on education. It re-affirmed by biases against public education and against teaching as opposed to learning. I was dismayed by the part on forced sterilizations. They took everything female out of my paternal aunt in the early 1920s because she was an epileptic. Ruined her. She spent most of the rest of her life as a ward of the State of Ohio in one of its institutions.

--Brant

did you write your long review so reading the books would be optional to the no-time-for-reading-them interested?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ed,

Good reviews.

I am a major fan of Peter Diamandis and Steven Kolter, and their book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. I haven't finished it yet, but I have watched several videos.

Here is Diamandis's TED Talk from early last year:

There is one area of capitalism that always gets the short end of the stick, but it's the axles and wheels and steering mechanism that keep the engine going places: marketing. Without marketing, the amount of products and services sold would be minimal, and by a long long way from today. It is one of the spreaders of wealth by fostering demand where none exists on its own.

One of the marketers who has had the greatest influence on me is Joe Polish and he is snug like a bug in a rug with Diamandis and Kolter and Singularity University as a whole.

Here is an interview Joe did with both at the beginning of last year.

He also interviewed Diamandis and Kolter for his Genius Network entrepreneur interview series:

If I am not mistaken, Joe and his people have taught marketing classes to the Singularity University people in general.

You might be interested in a photo at this link of Joe with his partner, Dean Jackson (there are only two photographs, so go to the link--you will not regret it):

Batman and Robin visit Frank Lloyd Wright home in Scottsdale

I invite you to bop around their I Love Marketing Marketing site. In case you didn't know it (but you probably do), a whole host of millionaires (including the likes of Richard Bransen) are fans of Ayn Rand. Joe and Dean are kind of like a hub for them, at least the ones who favor direct response markeing.

As to the other book you reviewed, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism by Robert Zubring, I have not read it yet. It looks very interesting, so I might get it.

On a final note, since I am such a Joe Polish fan, here is a video I am sure you will enjoy (It's a short one--if you don't have time to see the others, at least see this one, once again you will not regret it). It is called: "IS SELLING EVIL? This will change the way you look at selling and sales..."

Michael

[syrakusos]

Thanks, Ed! I am sorry that I did not get to this earlier. I will have other comments on RoR where I can vote with a sanction mark. For now, let me underscore your citation of Sugata Mitra who made a laptop available to children, but without instruction. The MIT Media lab did the same thing in Ethiopia. What I found interesting and alarming was the negative comments from those who objected.
Read here.

I sent my daughter a link to a Diamandis TED lecture last year.

Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future

Onstage at TED2012, Peter Diamandis makes a case for optimism -- that we'll invent, innovate and create ways to solve the challenges that loom over us. "I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems; we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.”

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future.html

[Brant Gaede]

That copy of AS was of course printed years if not decades after Wright died.

--Brant

my first copy--pb--cost 95 cents. Still have it somewhere.

[syrakusos]

That copy of AS was of course printed years if not decades after Wright died.

--Brant

my first copy--pb--cost 95 cents. Still have it somewhere.

Yes, Brant, that underscores the essential problem with marketing and why Mercury was the patron god of merchants and thieves: it can be so hard to tell them apart sometimes. I often say, as MSK did above, that you can have the best product or service in the world, but nothing happens until someone sells it to a buyer. That was actually a maxim in an office I worked at: "Nothing happens until someone sells something."

And as a lifelong Objectivist, I know all the arguments about self-interest, both your own and not trying to manage someone else's. You offer you goods or services. You give them incentives to buy, reasons, motivations, persuasions, whatever, but ultimately the choice is theirs. And I begins with being favorable to you. I get that.

But that anachronistic Atlas Shrugged underscores the fact that successful marketing has little to do with telling the truth, and everything to do with closing the sale. I know many very wealthy people who did and do stay in business "one customer at a time" on the P. T. Barnum model of enterprise.

The Randian Objectivist idea that you offer your best in exchange for theirs and all that, it is actually described better by both Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises in their descriptions of the creative. (That's a noun: what they call artists and writers in advertising agencies, the creatives.)

The Creative Genius

Far above the millions that come and pass away tower the pioneers, the

men whose deeds and ideas cut out new paths for mankind. For the pioneering

genius12 to create is the essence of life. To live means for him to create.

The activities of these prodigious men cannot be fully subsumed under

the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for

the genius not means, but ends in themselves. He lives in creating and

inventing. For him there is not leisure, only intermissions of temporary

sterility and frustration. His incentive is not the desire to bring about a result,

but the act of producing it. The accomplishment gratifies him neither

mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his

fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with

taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a genius could have used his gifts to

render his life agreeable and joyful; he did not even consider such a

possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation. The genius wants

to accomplish what he considers his mission, even if he knows that he moves

toward his own disaster.

Von Mises, Human Action, "Action Within the World" (1966 ed., pg 139)

http://mises.org/Books/humanaction.pdf

Rand's theory is that to the extent that each of us is truly a creative, we exchange our best for the best of others. In her books, the geniuses recognize each other: Roark and Mallory, easily, and in Atlas Shrugged, the entire population of the Valley. And life is like that for some of us. Howeever, that picture of Atlas Shrugged is evidence of the fact that successful marketers believe that the way to get rich (especially on the Internet) is to lie to stupid people.

With industrial goods, with production tools, patents, with things that really are measurable, Ayn Rand's rules apply. With consumer goods, it's P. T. Barnum.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michael,

Marketing is like nuclear power. You can use it to light a city or you can use it to blow the city up.

You can use marketing to create a demand where there is none and help create wealth, or you can use it to, as you say, lie to stupid people and take their money.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

You cannot use nuclear power to blow up a city, only to light it up. A nuclear explosion is powerful, but that's not nuclear power which is only electricity. Same, same, for hydro-power. It powers a city too, but when the dam breaks and the city gets flooded, that's not hydro-power, but it is powerful.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

Actually the metaphor as you describe it fits marketing better than a 1-to-1 ratio like I did.

You can only use marketing to lie to stupid people and take their money up to a point. There's a moment early on where it doesn't work anymore if that's all you use if for.

btw - You certainly can blow up an entire city with nuclear power. It just depends on how many bombs you use.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Grrr! If you don't agree with me at least don't tell us!

--Brant

seeking silencio!