Chic-onomics 101.

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BILL MCKIBBEN MALCOLM GLADWELL STEVEN D. LEVITT AND STEPHEN J. DUBNER JAMES SUROWIECKI BARBARA EHRENREICH JOHN PERKINS THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Harvard grad, former staff writer at the New Yorker, longtime environmental activist University of Toronto; worked at the Washington Post and, since 1999, at the New Yorker Levitt teaches at the University of Chicago; Dubner is a journalist University of North Carolina, post-graduate study at Yale; currently, yes, a columnist at the New Yorker An undergraduate degree from Reed and a Ph.D. in biology from Rockefeller University Perkins claims to have worked on behalf of the National Security Agency; the government disagrees Three Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award; a columnist at the New York Times DEEP ECONOMY, The End of Nature, Enough, and many others BLINK, The Tipping Point FREAKONOMICS THE WISDOM OF CROWDS NICKEL AND DIMED, Bait and Switch, Dancing in the Streets CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN THE WORLD IS FLAT, The Lexus and the Olive Tree McKibben represents the environmentalist wing of chic-onomics: his focus is on the way the logic of the marketplace, particularly its single-minded focus on growth, drives behavior that is gruesomely damaging to the earth's ecology--and, oddly, increasingly unproductive of human happiness. "On the list of important mistakes we've made as a species, this one seems pretty high up." The Tipping Point is about how little things--small groups of consumers, little bits of information, minor changes in policy--can have disproportionately large effects on the world around them. Blink explores the counter-intuitive notion that decisions made quickly, on the spur of the moment, can sometimes be better and smarter than slow, considered, well-informed choices. Levitt and Dubner like to upend familiar ideas--for example, the idea that drug dealers make a lot of money--by starting with raw economic data and first principles and proceeding to unexpected conclusions. They specialize in making audacious, counterintuitive connections, like linking falling crime rates to legalized abortion: fewer unwanted babies, fewer criminals 20 years later. Conventional wisdom tells us to fear the mob and revere the educated, well-informed expert. Surowiecki is interested in cases where the reverse is true, where mass behavior--by voters, bettors, teams, corporations, Web surfers--results in smarter decisions than those made by solitary specialists. "Brilliant experts have biases and blind spots," he points out. Crowds don't. "When someone works for less pay than she can live on--when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently--then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society." According to Perkins, his job was to travel the world browbeating developing nations into accepting massive loans, grants and contracts. The money would be then funneled to U.S. corporations, resulting in massive debt for the countries, which would be forced into a state of financial indentured servitude, which the U.S. government would abuse for political purposes. Draw your own conclusions. Friedman is fascinated by the economic, geopolitical and cultural repercussions of the "flattening" effects of Internet technology: "It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world." In one chapter McKibben spends an entire winter trying to eat food exclusively from the region he lives in, the Lake Champlain Valley. So lots of turnips, not a lot of salmon. In the process, he demonstrates how market pressures and globalization have destroyed local agriculture but also how the work of finding locally grown and raised food reconnects him with his community. Tennis coach Vic Braden almost always knew--in the split second between the toss and the actual serve--when a player was going to double-fault. But he didn't know why he knew. "It literally scared me," he says. "I was getting 20 out of 20 right." Gladwell's point: Sometimes we don't understand where our conclusions come from, but that's not necessarily a reason to mistrust them. For professional reasons--money and standing--sumo wrestlers need to finish tournaments with winning records. By analyzing match statistics, Levitt and Dubner all but prove that this gives rise to cheating. When one sumo wrestler needs a victory and the other has a loss to give, matches get thrown: "You let me win today, when I really need the victory, and I'll let you win the next time." On Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? contestants could call a "lifeline," a smart person they thought they could count on. They could also poll the audience. According to a spokeswoman for the show, the lifelines got the answer right 65% of the time. The audience--a crowd of random game-show-loving strangers--nailed it an impressive 91% of the time. You do the math. To write Nickel and Dimed Ehrenreich simply took a series of low-paying entry-level jobs--waitressing, cleaning houses--and tried to live on her earnings. The result is a devastating deromanticization of the myth that you can have a good life if you just work hard. "There are no secret economies that nourish the poor," she writes. "On the contrary, there are a host of special costs." In order to get a powerful Saudi, "Prince W.," on board with an elaborate scheme to (among other things) keep oil flowing to the U.S. at reasonable prices, Perkins exploited his target's weakness "for beautiful blondes" whenever Prince W. visited the U.S. "Luckily," Perkins writes, "the accounting department allowed me great liberties with my expense account." Here's postmodern, globalized irony for you. In 2003 the state of Indiana needed to upgrade the computer system that handled its unemployment claims. The contractor that won the job: Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., an Indian firm. "In other words ... Indiana was outsourcing the very department that would cushion the people of Indiana from the effects of outsourcing."