Author Archives: Alex Marshall

Catskill Review of Books Interviews Me

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Ian Williams, host of the Catskill Review of Books, a radio show, did a really nice interview with me about my new book. It’s clear he actually read my book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies. It’s heard on WJFF radio. I’ve been having problems finding a link to the show, but I know it’s out there. So if you do a search, you may be able to find it. I’m sorry I’m so inept technologically. I think you can download it via the radio site, and via Facebook and Amazon.

I Like Book Stores!

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But this may not have come through in my piece today in Bloomberg View about Book Pricing and all the crazy prices, some of them quite low, charged for my new book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies.

What got cut out of the piece, for space reasons, was where I said that what book stores are selling is the taste and judgement of their staff. When you walk in a book store, you are paying for someone to select and put before your eyes good books that are worth considering. In the age of the Internet, that’s actually more valuable, because one can become lost in a sea of books. And if that book stores gives you a pleasant, well-lit environment, with maybe a cafe to have a cup of coffee, all the better. It makes paying more for the actual physical book worth it.

My New Book “Surprising Design of Market Economies” Just Out

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You can get my latest book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, at your local bookstore or from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play etc. In it, I describe the ways that government builds our economy and culture, and argue that these deep structures should be a more explicit part of our public, political conversations. You can read Op-Eds I have written that draw upon the book in The New York Times [How To Get Business To Pay Its Fair Share], and two from Bloomberg View [Capitalism & Government Are Friends and Health Care Will Become a Right, Just Like Water].

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“Shades of Grey” Just Another Bodice Ripper – In Part

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Men who are tough, handsome, and rich, with a hint of violence. Men who shower their women with expensive gifts. Men who put up with caprice and childish behavior by their women. Such are the men of romance novels, as I said in an essay written way back in the 1994 in The Virginian-Pilot.

Reading Fifty Shades of Grey by the woman writer E.L. James, what’s immediately obvious is that this is essentially a romance novel. It fits the genre exactly. (In case anyone has been asleep for the last six months, Fifty Shades of Grey and its companion books have sold a zillion copies and attracted a lot of attention.) Besides the attributes I mention above, Shades of Grey also unspools at a monotonously slow pace, stretching out the moments before the protagonists actually get into bed. Another classic Romance novel technique. Women really do like foreplay, it seems.

What’s different about the book is that after eight chapters, it switches to what Tom Wolfe called a one-handed book, with exact detail of who did what to whom, in pretty graphic detail. This is not usual. At the same time, all this eroticism is wrapped in Bondage, Sadomasochism and Dominant/Submissive games. This is really not new, and not your mom’s romance novel.

What does it all mean? I do not know. I am surprised that millions of women (and it’s 95 percent women buying this book I’m sure) have an appetite for BDSM, as it is called. Perhaps we have reached the end times, where decadence abounds. Perhaps we are like the Roman Empire, rotting from within. Perhaps it’s all simply good fun. We have learned to be less uptight. I do not know.