In any event, and in roughly chronological order:

1. Clive James, Visions Before Midnight or The Crystal Bucket. His TV criticism. I think I read one or other these when I was twelve or thirteen, having bought them on holidays somewhere. Not exactly Leavis or Empson, I know. But it taught me a lot about how to write, encouraged me to pretend I knew about the literary stuff James habitually referred to in passing, and I’m pretty sure helped make me an insufferable teenaged shit.

2. Steven Vogel, Life’s Devices. Another random bookshop discovery. This is a book about biomechanics but also, and more importantly, a terrific introduction to what is means to do science. A lot of it went past me when I read it first, but it was still irresistible in part because (as I remember) it’s written with this quiet wit right the way through. Chock full of trivia that isn’t really trivia. Strangely enough, I think Vogel still teaches here at Duke. I should thank him personally for writing such a great book.

3. Bernd Heinrich, Ravens in Winter. Another book by a biologist. (Are you seeing my imagined career path here?) Another classic book on the practice of science. Heinrich follows ravens around in Vermont, trying to figure out why the hell they would share carrion they find. I’d recommend this book to anyone.

4. Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior. So clever, so unassuming, so it made me want to be an economist. Then I took some economics and it wasn’t much like Schelling at all.

5. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. I think this book made me want to do sociology. Bluntly creative. Briskly suggestive. Deeply frustrating.

6. David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany. I don’t know a damn thing about medieval German history, but I had to read this book very, slowly, carefully and repeatedly as part of a Sociology of Community course as a third year undergraduate. I learned a tremendous amount in the process. The cases are fascinating: a girl branded as a witch, a man who refused to say his prayers, the ritual burial of a bull at a crossroads. The analysis is subtle: Sabean is excellent on the fine grain of relations between the State and the peasantry, and how religion and cultural meaning generally express these relations. But for me it was the first academic monograph I really grasped and, in the process, came to understand how hard it must be to write a book that good.

7. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. I had to read chunks of it as a postgrad in Ireland, and as my reaction was one of constant irritation at Bourdieu’s writing style coupled with the feeling that he was getting at something important. I reread the first few chapters recently and was struck by how direct (and properly documented) its engagement with the literature was in comparison with much of the rest of his work, so I guess professional socialization has had its effect on me. But I was also surprised that it was as compelling as I remembered.

8. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve. This came out the year before I moved to the U.S. for graduate school. The book and the ensuing controversy around it taught me a lot about American academia, the wider world of the chattering classes in the U.S., the institutional structure that supported them, and the American public sphere generally. It wasn’t a pleasant lesson. As a piece of social science the book was terribly executed and written in transparently bad faith; the social sciences in general and sociology in particular botched their response; the pressure of media narratives flattened people into parodies of themselves; and many people who I’d thought might have known better turned out to have a healthy appetite for eugenic tripe, as long as it was presented more in sorrow than in anger.

9. William S. Cleveland, Visualizing Data. “This book presents a set of graphical methods for displaying data”. Does it ever. Tufte gets the Presidential Commissions and the high media profile, and deserves all that, but Cleveland shows you how it’s done in practice and wrote the software that lets you code it yourself. For me it opened up the world of serious thinking on data and model visualization for quantitative data.

10. Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship. Reading this wasn’t a transformative experience in some existential sense, but it obviously left a mark seeing as I ended up writing a dissertation and a book that revisited its main questions.

I’m getting some good comments from readers here, and through more conventional academic channels, which should help me sand down the rough spots a bit. Anyway, thanks to all for the comments I’ve received. It’s made a huge difference to me, and made the production of this book a much less daunting undertaking than laboring alone.

Remember, before pointing out stuff that is missing, that an earlier draft is online here and may be worth reading to see where I’m coming from.

Some zombies can be killed once and for all, and it seems that the global financial crisis may finally have buried the idea of comprehensive privatisation. Throughout the world, the need for governments to act as the ultimate guarantors of economic and financial stability has consigned advocates of a minimal state to the fringes of debate

Even groups on that fringe, such as the Tea Party protestors in the US, are deeply ambivalent, as is evidenced by the famous statement of one such protestor ‘‘keep your government hands off my Medicare’. While most on the right have tried to avoid such obvious self-contradiction, they have, as Paul Krugman has noted, abandoned serious attempts to scrap or privatise the key elements of the welfare state such as Medicare and Social Security.

And what is true in the US is true internationally. The British Conservative party, once the standard bearer for privatisation under Margaret Thatcher, have announced plans to allow public sector workers to set up cooperatives to run services such as primary schools and jobcentres. While some have expressed concern that this might be a backdoor route to privatisation, the central point is that the idea itself can no longer be defended in public, even by the party that did most to popularise it.

Elsewhere in Europe, the crisis has hit hard at the countries and governments that embraced the ideology of comprehensive privatisation most enthusiastically. Iceland, which hosted a triumphal meeting of the ultra-free market Mont Pelerin society only a few years ago, is now trying desperately to avoid national bankruptcy. Ireland is not much better off. The Baltic States are basket cases. Even in cases which seem, at first sight to involve a simple excess of spending over tax revenue, as in Greece, it turns out that a variety of quasi-privatisation measures helped to disguise the problem until it was too late to fix.

With the national exemplars of comprehensive privatisation in disarray, and its advocates in full retreat, it seems unlikely that this zombie idea will return from the grave any time soon.

That does not mean that we will see no more privatisation of government enterprises, nor, unfortunately, that silly and long-refuted arguments will be brought forward to support such measures.

In my own home state of Queensland, for privatisation the government is attempting to sell a range of income-generating assets, and claiming that the proceeds can be used to finance the construction of schools and hospitals. The fact that, unlike the enterprises being sold, the schools and hospitals will not generate profits to service the associated debt seems to have escaped their attention.

Sensible proponents of the mixed economy have never argued that privatisation should be opposed in all cases. As circumstances change, government involvement in some areas of the economy becomes more desirable, in others less so. In cases of the second kind, the appropriate response may well be to privatise existing government enterprises. And, unfortunately, whether or not any particular privatisation is justified, politicians will always be tempted to rely on superficially appealing, but spurious arguments of the kind being put forward in Queensland.

The crucial condition for the stability of a mixed economy is that shifts between the private and public sector should, broadly speaking balance out. Privatisations may take place, but they are balanced by extensions of government activity through the establishment of new public enterprises, the expansion of existing ones or, where private ownership has clearly failed, the nationalisation or renationalisation of private firms.

A good zombie movie needs a sequel, and so, it is almost inevitable that some zombies will survive to carry on the tradition. The best candidate for zombie immortality is probably the trickle-down hypothesis. As we’ve seen it can be traced back, under that name, at least to the early 20th century. But as long as there have been rich and poor people, or powerful and powerless people, there has been a market for advocates to explain that it’s better for everyone if things stay that way.

The hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’, one of the favorites in the hymnbook of my youth is, for the most part a paean to the beauties of creation. But, the real message comes in the verse ‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate’. And the same message is contained in Aesop’s fable, about the tail of the snake that foolishly rebelled against its natural master, the head, with dire consequences.

With such a long pedigree, trickle down economics is unlikely to be killed. Still, given the overwhelming evidence that social mobility in the US is both low by the standards of developed countries and decreasing steadily, the task of reanimating this zombie idea looks like a difficult one. But Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute is up to the job.

In his latest book, Intellectuals and Society, Sowell excoriates liberals for their misunderstanding of economics and sweeps aside concerns about declining social mobility with the assertion that, ‘neighborhoods may remain the home of poor people for generations, no matter how many people from the neighborhoods move out to a better life as they move up from one income bracket to another.’ He immediately contradicts himself with the observation that Harlem was formerly a middle-class Jewish community, and appears unaware of the recent (re)gentrification process in which blacks have again become a minority group in greater Harlem. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06harlem.html

This insouciant attitude to evidence is unsurprising. In earlier writing on the topic, Sowell made the observation that ‘ If mobility is defined as being free to move, then we can all have the same mobility, even if some end up moving faster than others and some of the others do not move at all. ’

In fact, on Sowell’s account, the US would remain the world’s most socially mobile society even if everyone ended up in the exact same social position as their parents.

As Sowell astutely observes ‘A car capable of going 100 miles an hour can sit in a garage all year long without moving. But that does not mean that it has no mobility.’ If the poor don’t succeed, he says, its because they are not willing to make the necessary efforts and sacrificies

Translating to the real world question, if we observe one set of children born into a wealthy family, with parents willing and able to provide high-quality schooling and ‘legacy’ admission to the Ivy League universities they attended, and another whose parents struggled to put food on the table, we should not be concerned that members of the first group almost invariably do better. After all, some people from very disadvantaged backgrounds achieve success. and there was no law preventing the rest from doing so.

Clearly, an idea so appealing to people who can afford to reward its promulgators is unlikely to be killed by mere evidence of its falsehood. Perhaps if the political left is willing to return to class politics (something the rightwing advocates of trickle down have never abandoned) it might, at least find a way to drive this zombie idea out of the assumed knowledge of political debate.

Cambridge has just published a new book, Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities (UK), which Ingrid and I edited (the idea of doing it was entirely Ingrid’s, I should say, and a brilliant idea it turned out to be). Its a fairly tightly focused collection, for which we invited two kinds of contribution. It opens with a shortened version of Pogge’s essay “Can the Capabilities Approach be Justified?” which many of the contributors refer back to, and the first part continues with a series of chapters considering the relative merits of Rawls’s social primary goods approach and the capabilities approach to the metric of justice; for this we invited contributors whom we believed would defend one or another of these metrics while giving careful criticisms of the rival, plus Dick Arneson whom we believed (rightly) could be relied on to help make progress despite not being associated with either view. For the second part we invited contributors who would think about some specific issue of justice (in health, education, gender, the family, disability) and consider the relative merits of the approaches with respect to that specific issue. We wrote a short analytical introduction which locates the debate in a broader context, and which, we hope, helps guide the reader through the book (the CUP page has a pdf of it, so you can judge for yourselves); the book concludes with a nice, partly autobiographical, essay by Sen engaging with the chapters in the first part of the book. The contributors so far unmentioned are Erin Kelly, Elizabeth Anderson, Norman Daniel, Lorella Terzi, Colin MacLeod, and Elaine Unterhalter. This is the second volume I’ve co-edited for Cambridge, and both times they have come up with much better titles than the editors would have done, good-looking but demure covers, and, most importantly, a reasonable price.

The ultimate zombie is one that is completely invulnerable. Neither special bullets nor hammer blows nor even decapitation can finally lay this undead being to rest. But dramatic logic requires that a zombie invulnerable to external threats must be subject to a subtle, but ultimately terminal, flaw that ends in its own destruction.

Ultimate zombies arise quite commonly in science and economics in the form of ideas that are immune from refutation. The classic examples arise from the popularised versions of Freudian psychology, centred on the Oedipus complex, named for the Greek tragic hero who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. If a son hates his father, this is, obviously, evidence of the Oedipus complex. But, if he loves his father, this is explained as a repressed Oedipus complex. With rules like this, Freudian psychology can never be refuted.

But as a string of philosophers of science, being with the late Karl Popper, have shown, a theory that can’t be refuted by any conceivable evidence isn’t really a theory at all. All it says, in the end, is ‘anything can happen, and probably will’.

The global financial crisis, along with the earlier dotcom crisis has shown that, on any ordinary understanding of its terms, the efficient markets hypothesis can’t be right. Despite reaching a scale and sophistication unparalleled in history, global financial markets have shown themselves subject to the same manias, bubbles and busts that were seen in the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century.

So supporters of the efficient markets hypothesis have sought a redefinition that would make it invulnerable to refutation. Their central argument is one that has already been discussed  - if it is possible to diagnose the existence of a bubble, then it is possible to make arbitrarily large profits betting against it. And if someone like Warren Buffett has in fact done this, that can be put down to luck. Only if everybody can make money betting against the market can the EMH be wrong. But of course, it’s impossible for everyone to bet against the market – the market is just the aggregate of bets.

This argument in one form or another has been put forward by all the leading defenders of the EMH, notably including Eugene Fama and John Cochrane of Chicago and Scott Sumner of Bentley University

This set of observations from Scott Sumner in a blog post aptly titled ‘Defending the indefensible’ at least recognises the difficulties of the position

But why is Fama’s theory now in such disrepute?  Because in the past ten years the world economy has seen two very important bubble-like patterns, indeed arguably the only two such market cycles in the US during my lifetime with macro significance.  And they were both predicted by lots of experts because they violated popular theories of fundamentals.  So start with the cognitive illusion that people have that makes them see bubbles even where there don’t exist.   People think they have made accurate predictions because an upswing is always EVENTUALLY followed by a downturn.  Then add in the fact that The Economist really did make accurate predictions in two of the most important events in modern history.  Do you think it will be possible to convince them that they just got lucky?  About as likely as a husband convincing an already suspicious wife that he is innocent after twice being caught in bed with two separate women.  So I feel sorry for Fama.  He’s probably right, but I don’t see how he could ever convince anyone in this environment.  It would be like trying to convince someone that neoliberalism was the right policy in 1933.

As a well known blogger would say, ‘Indeed’. Looking at the evidence of the two gigantic bubbles of the last decade, it’s hard to see how Sumner maintains his own faith, and he never really gives an explanation, except to say that it’s easy to misperceive bubbles. As far as macroeconomics is concerned, the experience of the Great Depression and of the current Global Financial Crisis (which as Sumner implies, really began with the 2001 recessions) is pretty strong evidence that neoliberalism is not the right policy, at least not for all occasions and not in the forms that prevailed in the 1920s or the 1990s.

But the ultimate response to this invulnerable zombie must be the same as Popper on Freudian psychology. If the Great Depression, the dotcom boom and bust and the current Global Financial Crisis are all consistent with the efficient markets hypothesis, the hypothesis can’t tell us much of interest about anything. At most, it says that even when markets are way out of line with economic reality, it is hard to exploit this fact to make a profit. Most of us (me and Krugman at any rate) already knew that, and confined ourselves to getting out of stocks when they seemed absurdly overvalued.  

The crucial point in a good zombie movie is the moment when zombies who seem to have been blasted into the next world by the hero’s shotgun, pull themselves up from the ground and come shambling forward. In the writing of this book, that moment came for me when I read Casey Mulligan’s paper ‘Aggregate Implications of Labor Market Distortions: The Recession of 2008-9 and Beyond’

Looking at the way real business cycles theorists have tried to write the Great Depression out of macroeconomic history, presenting instead as a government-induced dislocation of labour markets it was obvious that, sooner or later, something similar would be attempted with the Global Financial Crisis. But, Great Depression revisionism did not take hold until the Depression had faded out of living memory, to the point where hardly any economists who had actually experienced it were still active.

I thought a similar process of fading memory would be required for the GFC. As long as the subprime fiasco, and the chaos of late 2008 remained vivid memories, it would be impossible to deny that this was, indeed, a crisis made in the financial markets.

I underestimated the speed and power of Zombie ideas. As early as Sep 2009, Casey Mulligan was willing to claim that the entire crisis could be explained in terms of labor market interventions. According to Mulligan, financial markets anticipated a variety of measures from the Obama Administration, observing ‘Arguably, the 2008 election was associated with an increase in the power of unions to shape public policy, and thereby the labor market. Congress has considered various legislation that would raise marginal income tax rates, and would present Americans with new health benefits that would be phased out as a function of income.’

This is truly impressive. So perspicacious are the financial markets, that even the possibility that Congress might raise taxes, or incorporate a means test in health care legislation that might be passed some time in the future (at the time of writing this in Feb 2010, the bill was still tied up) was sufficient to bring down the entire global financial market. And, even though the McCain-Palin ticket was widely seen as having a good chance (at least before the September 2008), the markets didn’t wait for the election returns to come in. Applying some superstrong version of market efficiency, market participants predicted the election outcome, applied Mulligan’s neoclassical model to the predicted policies of the Obama Administration and (perfectly rationally) panicked.

There is one problem with Mulligan’s neat explanation. Writing in October 2008, when the crisis had already erupted and when Obama’s victory was virtually assured Mulligan had this to say about proposals for economic stimulus

So, if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry. The current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming, and we should reconsider whether it is worth it to spend $700 billion to bring it down to 5.9 percent.

This piece, which got the endorsement of his Chicago colleague, Freakonomist Steven Levitt, doesn’t even mention the possibility that a Democratic Congress might raise taxes, or that the health plan that was a central plank of candidate Obama’s platform might include means test. Yet he now claims that these possibilities (still hypothetical as of 2010) caused a massive increase in unemployment, the anticipation of which caused the crash!

H/T Brad DeLong

… on 26 September 2008 I received a Subpoena to appear before a French Examining Judge in connection with an investigation of alleged criminal libel based on a complaint made by Dr Calvo-Goller essentially replicating the complaints in her first letter to me. … in libel cases, all investigations of the merits of the case are exclusively reserved for the Criminal Court itself and, therefore, as a direct consequence of the complaint being filed, it was necessary that I be referred to the Court for trial. The date for the trial has now been set for 25 June 2010.

The review (in the European Journal of International Law ) is decidedly pungent, but (without commenting on the legal aspects,which I know nothing about) it seems to my eyes to be well within the usual norms of academic book reviewing (where a general tendency towards back-slapping congeniality is leavened by occasional fits of vigorous criticism). Weiler asks that academics who are upset at Dr. Calvo-Goller’s novel approach to managing the fallout from negative book-reviews send letters of “indignation/support” by email attachment (preferably with letterhead and affiliation) to EJIL.academicfreedom@Gmail.com, especially if they are editors or book review editors for other journals. He also asks that people send scanned or digital copies of other caustic book reviews to this address, so as to demonstrate that Dr. Calvo-Goller’s unhappy experience at the hands of a critic is nothing unusual. As an occasional author of uncomplimentary book reviews myself, I encourage people both (a) to send such reviews in and (b) to link them in comments, especially if they are well written. I do wonder whether Dr. Calvo-Goller appreciated the notoriety that she would accrue through her actions; The Chronicle already has a piece on this, Inside Higher Ed won’t be far behind, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised at all if this story breaks out into the mainstream press.

3. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a meat lovers pizza in his hands.” (Chandler)

4. Never use a verb other than “ejaculated” to carry the dialogue, eg. “’I don’t really know what to say to you, Ivan Ivanych,’ Nastasya Petrovna ejaculated tearfully.” (Chekhov)

5. Use as many exclamation points as possible! No! Really! Do! ! !

Feel encouraged to suggest others in comments. Via MJH.

Discuss. What’s your favorite Chesterton? Is Father Brown as fundamentally tedious as I take him to be? Is Innocent Smith just as tedious, only I like him because I’m susceptible to any whiff or soupcon of man-and-superman themery? The public is banging on its breakfast table, demanding answers to these and other questions, quite possibly.

Sunday afternoon mashup: Fleetwood mac vs. Daft Punk. Good stuff!

Thinner, Better, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, plus the constructivist implication of ‘you make’, being the spiritual red thread running through this post, as it were. Daft Bodies an all.

In his latest title, Lévy launches a scathing attack on the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”. In framing his case, Lévy – BHL to the Parisian cognoscenti – drew on the writings of the little-known 20th century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul – author of The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant , and a man Lévy has cited in lectures. The problem? Botul never existed. He was invented by a journalist from the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné 10 years ago as an elaborate joke. And since the hoax was revealed, BHL has become a laughing stock.

Scott McLemee, recently accused in these here comments sections of disgusting anti-French-playboy-philosopher-bias for his previous writings on BHL, has the lowdown on this sublime and funky work of scholarship here.

A friend who has read La vie sexuelle tells me that the author’s tongue is very conspicuously in his cheek. That BHL cited it as a serious work of scholarship would strongly suggest that he has an employee or two toiling in the erudition mines for him. If so, it is an interesting question whether the person who actually read Botul misunderstood the nature of the book—or passed along the citation as an act of sabotage. Either way, it seems like a fireable offense. (Of course, nothing like that ever happens in the academic world.)

I wondered the same thing myself when I first read about this. When we see BHL’s name on a book, are we to understand it as a brand, rather like Damien Hirst’s signature on ‘his’ spot paintings? Perhaps we can expect an authentication committee with all the accompanying controversy to begin its work after his eventual demise? Or did he indeed write all or most of it himself? There’s much entertaining speculation to be had. Readers should also betake themselves to Scott’s earlier pieces for Inside Higher Ed and The Nation (the Nation piece is a small masterpiece of the ‘the victim pinned and struggling on the wall’ genre; the IHE article has some very astute judgments from Arthur Goldhammer).

The short-form/long-form distinction isn’t, then, the crux of the issue, because it doesn’t touch on the reason why people are anxious about suffering ADD. I think I agree with Henry about how we should have more short-form stuff, for pretty much the reasons he articulates. But what people are worried about, when they vaguely wish away short-form stuff, is a “nudge”-type issue, in the Sunstein and Thaler sense. It’s not that they seriously think all short stuff is bad stuff. or even that short stuff tends to be bad. Rather, all the stuff we are most tempted to overindulge in, against our own better judgment, is short. (If this were Victorian England, maybe we would be wringing our hands about how everyone is disappearing into enormous triple-decker novels for days and days and neglecting to keep up with current events. They aren’t remembering to send everyone else letters twice a day.)

Saying that all the stuff we are tempted to overindulge in is short is perfectly consistent with saying that, on average, short stuff is much better than long stuff. I think that’s it in a nutshell.

The main reason we are tempted to overindulge in short stuff is that it is there. So obtrusively ready-to-hand, like chips on the handlebars. So I maintain that Western Civilization can be saved, and people can return to reading long Kierkegaard books again – possibly even Melville’s Clarel – if only someone will come up with a simple app for time-locking our computers and mobile devices. Indeed, it would be such a basic and powerful productivity tool that it should come standard on all devices.

It is true that for the best books, there is no substitute for a book. I do not want to read Robert Caro’s blog posts if they will delay his final volume on Lyndon Johnson by so much as an hour. But for many books, a few blog posts, or an article, would work just fine, and the reader would save a lot of time in the process. And time has value.

I think you can push this argument further. I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time (i.e. good books in politics, economics etc – I can’t speak to genres that I don’t know) are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself. Length may also, of course, reflect some practical judgments concerning the book as a display object (I seem to remember Tyler Cowen somewhere suggesting that only a relatively small percentage of books bought are actually read ). Books which are, for example, extended versions of articles written for The Atlantic, The Public Interest or what have you are especially likely to be over-long for their topic – I don’t remember ever reading one of these books and feeling that I got substantial insights which were unavailable in the original article (in some cases it might have been useful to have a better sourced and slightly better fleshed out version of the original piece available somewhere, perhaps half the length again of the original piece, but there doesn’t appear to be a market for that).

All this may be changing as we move towards an electronic book publishing system. The economics of electronic text production are not the same as the economics of book production (as best as I understand either), and there aren’t the same pressures towards standardization of length. I suspect that people who would feel cheated if they paid ‘book’ price for a long essay (say around 20,000 words or so) will feel less so if they buy an electronic version. Ideally, we will end up in a world where people won’t feel obliged to pad out what are really essays to book length in order to get published and compensated. If I’m right, we will see a lot more essay-length publications than we used to. I suspect too that the effects will be non-symmetrical – that is that we will see an explosion in the number of very short books/essays, which will be somewhat cheaper than traditional books, but not very cheap, a moderate decrease in the number of ‘standard’ (say, 60,000-90,000 word length) books, and stability or decrease in the number of long books (books with 100,000+ words). Long books still cost a lot of money to edit. I also suspect that we will see traditional printed books become (a) more expensive, and (b) more beautiful – their main value will be as display items rather than use items. Of course, I have no direct experience of the publishing industry (except as author) and know that several of our commenters know more, and have strong opinions, so look forward to being corrected on any or all of the above …