Book Review: The Social Animal

The Social Animal is an ambitious, wide-ranging and very cleverly written book. It’s author, David Brooks is a columnist with the New York Times and has had a long standing interest in the human condition. In this book, he aims to synthesise a great deal of research from fields like neuroscience and psychology to present a status update of why we live in the ways that we do. But what could be a heavy-going academic study is made much more accessible by his use of a fictional narrative as we follow the lives of Harold and Erica on their journey through growing up, marriage, careers and growing old. All human life is in there along with many fascinating explanations of why we do what we do.

Each of the chapters deal with issues that are of interest to the marketer or strategist such as decision making, attachment, learning, self-control, culture, choice architecture and so on. We are also introduced to some less well known concepts such as limerene (harmony between our inner and outer worlds) and metis (wisdom emerging from the interaction of the conscious and unconscious). In each case, extant research from different fields is summarised to provide explanations of human phenomena. For example, the discussion on human choices contrasts the rational choice models of classical economists with those of behavioural economists who emphasise peer pressure, overconfidence, laziness and self-delusion. Anyone seeking to explain the recent global financial crisis would tend to find more answers in the latter.

Overall, this is a multi-faceted book that different readers will get different things from. For example, business jargon takes an indirect and deserved hammering – ‘we are driving maximum functionality with end-to-end mission-critical competence to incent high-level blue-ocean change’!! It is packed full with interesting questions. The unconscious is responsible for peak performance? The pursuit of ‘objective measures’ in political decisions have destroyed social capital? And of course, what is the meaning of life? Indeed, Brooks introduces the interesting notion of epistemological modesty – that is, the knowledge of how little we know and can know. Despite decades of advances, the human condition remains a fertile area of study.

Book Review: The Winner-Take-All Society

If you have ever wondered why bankers or company CEOs get paid so much or why it is that soccer clubs around the world are going bankrupt while some of their slightly above average players earn more in a week than most of us do in a year, then The Winner Take-All Society is the book for you. What you should know straight away is that this book was first published in 1995 and perhaps it is because the authors, economists Robert Frank and Philip Cook got it so right back then, that the publishers decided to bring out an updated edition.

The book essentially breaks into two parts. The first explains how winner-take-all markets come about, it looks at the pace with which they have been growing in a global and technologically-connected world and it looks at how this creates an enormous gap in income between rich and poor. The core reason why winner-take-all markets have grown is that the market for talent is now characterised by high levels of information and labour mobility. So for example, a top CEO can now not only move to another firm in the same industry but can move across industry and geographic boundaries. Each move brings a big pay rise. And if you want a top executive to stay you need to give him/her a pre-emptive rise in salary. Either way executive salaries shoot upwards. The same thing has been happening in movies, music, sport, modelling and in the worlds of ‘unknown celebrities’ such as law, medicine, consulting and yes even academe!

The second part of the book looks at the economic consequences of this income and wealth inequality. For example, the authors argue that winner-take-all markets attract talent far out of proportion to their contribution to national output. Witness how fields like science and engineering have struggled to attract interest while our best and brightest compete to become hedge fund traders. And we don’t need reminding of the societal impact of the excesses of the finance industry. A variety of other consequences are explained ranging from why athletes often pay with their lives to reach the top to why media industries seem be obsessed with finding outputs such as books and movies from celebrities. In short, this is a highly accessible and well-argued read that is a book for our time.