Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2011

Health advocates argue in advance of the data in new cancer study

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:36

Rob Lyons on the latest cancer study, which makes unsubstantiated claims about the “lifestyle” causes of cancer:

The essential idea we are being sold here is that medical experts know that certain behaviours — like smoking, drinking alcohol, eating read meat and not eating enough fruit and vegetables — increase your risk of developing cancer by a certain percentage. So, all we need to do is work out how many people would have got cancer if no one did any of those things, take that number away from the number of people who do get cancer, and the remainder is how many people that ‘unhealthy living’ is killing. Simple, right?

According to the report, If you do all the ‘right’ things — if you are a cigarette-dodging, skinny teetotaller who avoids all red meat, barely goes out in the sun (except, perhaps, to take the prescribed 30-minute sessions of exercise five times per week), gets lashings of fibre, cuts down on salt, avoids infectious diseases and ionising radiation, and so on — then you can cut your cancer risk by over 40 per cent. On that basis, you may avoid cancer but die of boredom instead.

More specifically, even in this report there’s a huge gulf between the widely acknowledged risk of smoking — which is estimated here to cause 19.4 per cent of all cancers — and other risk factors. Smoking accounts for nearly half the lifestyle risk of 43 per cent claimed in the report. The next biggest factors suggested are overweight and obesity (5.5 per cent), lack of fruit and veg (4.7 per cent), alcohol (4.0 per cent), occupation (3.7 per cent) and sunlight (3.5 per cent). No other single factor, according to the report, is responsible for more than three per cent of cancers. Some oft-quoted examples like salt (0.5 per cent) and physical exercise (one per cent) have little effect at all. Even avoiding red meat altogether would only avoid 2.5 per cent of cancers, says the report.

December 7, 2011

Beijing’s “smog blog” at the US Embassy

Filed under: China, Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

The official line is that the smog in Beijing is merely inconvenient, while the US Embassy’s Twitter account sends out regular readings that conflict with the official story:

It was a contest over smog that was being fought across two social networks in two completely different languages between two contenders separated by the world’s biggest firewall. At stake was the authority to define “unhealthy air” and, as a result, to shape public perceptions and expectations.

On one side was an automated air quality monitoring station set up by the US embassy in Beijing that issues hourly updates via Twitter on the @beijingair account. It states the date, time, pollutions readings for ozone and PM2.5 and a terse English summary of the health implications. At 8am, it read “very unhealthy” — an improvement on the “hazardous” level of the previous day and the alarming “beyond index” of last Friday.

On the other side was the personal microblog of Du Shaozhong, the deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Administration, who has taken his passionate defence of the city’s policies onto China’s most influential website, Sina Weibo. One of his most recent posts read: “It is understandable if people hate bad weather, but venting your emotions is not helpful.”

December 6, 2011

The GOP field, in brief

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Really, it’s no wonder that GOP voters are seriously unimpressed with the field of candidates they’ve got to put up with. L. Neil Smith sums up the “front-runners” on the way to explaining why Herman Cain’s bid was quashed:

I don’t write about race very often, because it’s unimportant to me. But allow me to preface this by admitting I never liked Herman Cain.

Not as a presidential candidate. It had nothing to do with his color, of course. I can think instantly of three black men (Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Richard Boddie) who would make excellent candidates, and Cain, for all his mercantilist baggage, would have made a better President than that crypto-Democrat Mitt Romney, or America’s answer to Benito Mussolini, Il Douchebag himself, Newt Gingrich.

I leave Rick Perry undescribed only because I can’t summon up an adjective adequate to deal with this dull-witted second-rate George Bush imitation, a walking, talking violation of the Law of Natural Selection.

Cain, however, did not find himself jettisoned from the American electoral process because of his opinions on policy (at least not directly), his past association with the Evil Menace of Fast Food, or even because of the naughty things he was accused of having done with women by three specimens of highly questionable believability and a million braying jackasses of the government-approved news-generating industry.

Cain got the boot because—well, let me tell you a story …

Guardian study finds that August rioters were motivated by Guardian editorials

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

Brendan O’Neill on the recent study, carried out by the London School of Economics and the Guardian:

Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? A four-month Guardian/London School of Economics study into the riots that rocked English cities in August has found that the rioters were pretty much Guardian editorials made flesh. Concerned about government cuts, annoyed by unfair policing, shocked by social inequality and outraged by the MPs’ expenses scandal, it seems the young men and women who looted shops and burnt down bus stops weren’t Thatcher’s children after all — they were Rusbridger’s children, the moral offspring of those moral guardians of chattering-class liberalism.

This is a blatant case of advocacy research, of researchers finding what they wanted to find, or at least desperately hoped to find. For months now, the Guardian has been publishing articles arguing that the rioters were politically motivated, under headlines such as ‘These riots were political’ and with claims such as ‘the looting was highly political’ and the riots were a protest against ‘brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. And now, lo and behold, a Guardian study, Reading the Riots, has discovered that the rioters were indeed ‘rebels with a cause’, with 86 per cent of the 270 rioters interviewed claiming the violence was caused by poverty, 85 per cent arguing that policing was the big issue, and 80 per cent saying they were riled by government policies. Reading this study, we are left to marvel either at the extraordinary perspicacity of Guardian writers, or at their ability to carry out research in such a way that it confirms their own political preconceptions.

This study looks less like a cool-headed, neutral piece of sociology, and more like a semi-conscious piece of political ventriloquism, where rioters have been coaxed to mouth the political beliefs of the middle-class commentariat. This is not to say the Guardian and LSE researchers have been purposely deceitful, inventing evidence to suit a political thesis. Advocacy research is more subtle and less conscious than that. It involves a kind of inexorable pursuit of facts that fit and evidence that helps bolster a pre-existing conviction. So mental-health charities keen to garner greater press coverage always find high levels of mental illness, children’s charities that want to raise awareness about child abuse always find rising levels of child neglect, and now Guardian researchers who want to show that they’re right to fret about Lib-Con policies and outdated policing have found that these are burning issues amongst volatile English yoof, too.

December 5, 2011

Moral hazard invades the scientific sphere

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:23

Bill Frezza looks at an unanticipated consequence of pouring more government money into the sciences:

Science and the scientific method are the jewels in the crown of Western civilization. The ascertainment of facts, construction of reproducible experiments, development of falsifiable theories, impartial training and meritocratic advancement of practitioners, and — most importantly — integrity of the publication process by which a well established body of truth can be confidently assembled all underpin the respect accorded to science by the citizenry. In modern times, this respect translates into tax dollars.

Unfortunately, today those tax dollars are corrupting the process. Unprecedented billions are doled out by unaccountable federal and state bureaucracies run by and for the benefit of a closed guild of practitioners. This has created a moral hazard to scientific integrity no less threatening than the moral hazard to financial integrity that recently destroyed our banking system.

According to a report in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, nearly two-thirds of the experimental results published in peer-reviewed journals could not be reproduced in Bayer’s labs. The latest special issue of Science is devoted to the growing problem of irreproducibility. The Wall Street Journal reports that Amgen, Pfizer, and others have abandoned research programs after spending hundreds of millions pursuing academic research that could never be replicated.

H/T again to Monty for the link.

Debunking memes: the Gini co-efficient as a spark for rioting

Filed under: Britain, Economics, France, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Theodore Dalrymple shows that the widespread habit of journalists in Britain to attempt to attribute the root cause of August riots to the Gini co-efficient fails the common-sense test:

An August feature story on the riots in Time offered a particularly striking example. The author suggested that to understand the riots, we should start with “something called the Gini co-efficient, a figure used by economists to indicate how equally (or unequally) income is distributed across a population.” In this traditional measure, the article notes, Britain fares worse than almost every other country in the West.

This little passage is interesting for at least two reasons. First is the unthinking assumption that more equality is better; complete equality would presumably be best. Second is that the author apparently did not think carefully about the table of Gini coefficients printed on the very same page and what it implied about his claim. Portugal headed the list as the most unequal of the countries selected, with a 0.36 coefficient. Next followed the U.K. and Italy, both with a 0.34 coefficient. Toward the bottom of the list, one found France, with a 0.29 coefficient, the same as the Netherlands. Now, it is true that journalists are not historians and that, for professional reasons, their time horizons are often limited to the period between the last edition of their publication and the next. Even so, one might have expected a Time reporter to remember that in 2005 — not exactly a historical epoch ago — similar riots swept France, even though its Gini coefficient was already lower than Britain’s. (Having segregated its welfare dependents geographically, though, France saw none of its town or city centers affected by the disorder.)

As it happened, when I read the Time story, I had an old notebook with me. In it, among miscellaneous scribblings, was the following list, referring to the riots in France and made contemporaneously:

    Cities affected 300
    Detained 2,921
    Imprisoned 590
    Burned cars 9,071
    Injured 126
    Dead 1
    Police involved 11,200
    Average number of cars burned per day before riots 98

And all this with a Gini coefficient of only 0.29! How, then, could it have happened? It might also be worth mentioning that the Netherlands, with its relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.

December 4, 2011

“Scratch a Walmart-basher and you’ll find a snotty elitist, a person who hates capitalism and consumption and deep down thinks the Wrong People have Too Much Stuff”

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:09

ESR shares his thoughts about WalMart bashing:

I find that, as little as I like excess and overconsumption, voicing that dislike gives power to people and political tendencies that I consider far more dangerous than overconsumption. I’d rather be surrounded by fat people who buy too much stuff than concede any ground at all to busybodies and would-be social engineers.

But there’s more than that going on here . . .

Rich people going on about the crassness of materialism, or spouting ecological pieties, often seem to me to me to be retailing a subtle form of competitive sabotage. “There, there, little peasant . . .” runs the not-so-hidden message “. . .it is more virtuous to have little than much, so be content with the scraps you have.” After which the speaker delivers a patronizing pat on the head and jets off to Aruba to hang with the other aristos at a conference on Sustainable Eco-Multiculturalism or something.

I do not — ever — want to be one of those people. And just by being a white, college-educated American from an upper-middle-class SES, I’m in a place where honking about overconsumption sounds even to myself altogether too much like crapping on the aspirations of poorer and browner people who have bupkis and quite reasonably want more than they have.

December 2, 2011

QotD: “Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk”

Filed under: Cancon, Football, Humour, Media, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

I was at the urinal next to Bob Costas once. It was at the 2010 Winter Olympics, just before the Closing Ceremony, during which Canada said goodbye to the world with a nightmarish glowing dreamscape of giant beavers and plaid-wearing lumberjacks and dancing Mounties and flying moose and looming table hockey players and William Shatner, among others. Pretty sure we, as a country, were drunk.

But Bob Costas was not drunk, because Costas is a sober and professional man who disapproves of you and your shenanigans, probably. Costas is among the great broadcasters of his generation, as witnessed most recently by his stellar on-camera interview with accused Penn State pedophile Jerry Sandusky. And despite some creases in his face, and perhaps a whisper of greying hair, Costas remains youthful, even boyish.

Like just about everything in television, however, that is at least partly a facade, as Costas’ monologue on Football Night in America on Sunday last week demonstrated. As if channeling Andy Rooney in 1978, Costas inferred that touchdown celebrations are basically ruining the minds of our children, with their iPhones and their pornography and their touchdown dances. If life is a football field, it is time to leave Bob Costas’s lawn.

Bruce Arthur, “NFL Picks, Week 13: NFL players can dance if they want to”, National Post, 2011-12-02

European anti-piracy campaign didn’t get permission to use music

Filed under: Europe, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

In a lovely turn-about, they’re being sued by the composer whose music was, um, pirated:

Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.

A story currently unfolding in the Netherlands painfully exposes the double standards and corruption that can be found in some parts of the copyright industry.

It all started back in 2006, when the Hollywood-funded anti-piracy group BREIN reportedly asked musician Melchior Rietveldt to compose music for an anti-piracy video. The video in question was to be shown at a local film festival, and under these strict conditions the composer accepted the job.

However, according to a report from Pownews the anti-piracy ad was recycled for various other purposes without the composer’s permission. When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident.

The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. According to Rietveldt’s financial advisor, the total sum in missed revenue amounts to at least a million euros ($1,300,000).

H/T to occultado for the link.

Biggest general strike since 1926 becomes a “damp squib”

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:07

Some sense the evil hand of . . . Jeremy Clarkson?

It was to be the biggest strike in a generation. People were openly and unabashedly comparing Wednesday’s day of action over public sector pensions to the general strike of 1926. It was to bring Britain to a standstill. Mark a turning point in the battle against the cuts instigated by the spawns of the evil Iron Lady. Become a talking point that would strike fear into the cold heart of Cameron and pave the way to bigger, more decisive action.

Except, erm, the very next morning it had been almost completely forgotten. It barely registered as a blip on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. Newspaper coverage was on the whole sympathetic, but slight. None of the predicted chaos came to pass. Prime minister Cameron could quite safely dismiss the strike as a ‘damp squib’ and provoke few comments except from the usual suspects. People shrugged and went back to work. Far from being a Great Event like the 1926 strike that people would draw inspiration from in 85 years time, it was barely discussed. As my colleague Brendan O’Neill had anticipated, it all felt more like a ‘loud and colourful PR stunt ultimately designed to disguise the fact that, in truth, trade unions are a sad shadow of their former selves’.

Just as the PR flames were beginning to dim, however, enter Jeremy Clarkson, the cartoonish presenter of Top Gear, who sped to the rescue with a particularly naff joke about the strikers being shot in front of their families. Of course, he didn’t actually mean it. In the context of the programme, BBC1’s The One Show, his remarks were actually more a dig at the BBC: he had in fact been praising the strikers (‘London today has just been empty. Everybody stayed at home, you can whizz about… it’s also like being back in the 70s. It makes me feel at home somehow.) but then said, as it was the Beeb, he had to provide ‘balance’, making his now notorious quip: ‘Frankly, I’d have them all shot. I would take them outside and execute them in front of their families. I mean, how dare they go on strike when they have these gilt-edged pensions that are going to be guaranteed while the rest of us have to work for a living?’

Update: James Delingpole said he’s been flooded with interview requests since the strike began, largely because of the public’s reaction to the strike:

I got my answer from a chance remark made by Jeremy Vine after our interview. He was telling me about the phone-in he’d done the day before during the public sector workers’ strike and what had astonished him was the mood of the callers. If I remember what he said correctly, one of his studio guests was a nurse on a £40,000 PA salary, with a guaranteed £30,000 pension, and this had not gone down well with the mother-of-three from Northern Ireland struggling as a finance officer in the private sector on a salary of £14,000 and no pension to speak of. The callers were very much on the side of the private sector. In fact, they were on the whole absolutely apoplectic that privileged, relatively overpaid public sector workers with their gold-plated pensions should have the gall to go out on strike when the people who pay their salaries – private sector workers – have to go on slogging their guts out regardless.

[. . .]

After all, as Fraser Nelson reports, the strike itself was a massive flop. Only a minority of union members voted it for it; the turn-out was so poor that the unions felt compelled to send out hectoring letters accusing their membership of being “scabs”; the hospitals – and many schools – stayed open, Heathrow’s immigration queues actually got shorter. This was not the glorious day of action (or inaction) that the militants had hoped for. Nor did it fit into the BBC’s ongoing narrative that Osborne’s vicious cuts (what cuts, we ask) are causing such hardship and misery among the saintly frontline public sector workers who bravely rescue our cats from trees and smilingly change our bed pans that really a Labour government run by Ed Balls is the only option.

Not only were the strikes a failure in numbers terms, though, but more damagingly they were a failure in propaganda terms. As both Fraser Nelson and Jeremy Vine have noted, there really has been a shift in public mood. I remember not more than a year ago going on Vine’s show to state, somewhat provocatively that I’d rather toss my children out on the street than have them sponging off the taxpayer in the public sector, and of course the mainly left-leaning BBC audience went apoplectic. I think if I’d gone on and said the same thing today they would probably have been demanding a statue erected in my honour in Parliament Square.

December 1, 2011

A defence of Jeremy Clarkson’s “strikers should be shot” comment

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

From, of all places, the Guardian:

How are your outrage levels today? Seen a sweary racist on a tram? Heard a TV personality make a bad joke about shooting public sector workers? Retweeted it and carefully added the correct hashtag?

Were you really, genuinely outraged?

Think about how you would have reacted to the story of an obnoxious woman on a tram seven years ago (pre-YouTube — PYT if you like). Would you have told everyone you know? Would you have asked them to tell everyone they know? Or would you have shrugged, mumbled something about the world going to hell in a handcart, and gone back to watching Top Gear, only to be confronted by Jeremy Clarkson making a hilarious joke about Spanish woman gypsy drivers (shrug again, change channel).

YouTube and Twitter are wonderful, wonderful things that have changed how we interact with the world, to the extent that I’m not sure I can remember life PYT. But they have created a mechanism by which we can we can monitor and record behaviour, whether of private citizens or public figures, play them over and over again, and share them with an alarming rapidity. Perhaps this heightened speed also leads us to feel forced into heightened reactions. Without the time to digest context and meaning we can only choose from a range of default reactions, largely based on our own prejudices.

[. . .]

Likewise with angry racist tram lady. My initial reaction to the video was “God, that’s horrible”, but as the storm grew, to the point where even Mia Farrow felt the need to tell us that she thought racism in south London was, y’know, just awful, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the woman who had become a vessel for everyone else’s outrage. The sheer volume of righteousness becomes off-putting.

And now Clarkson, who has made a dull golf club bar joke about striking public sector workers needing to be shot. God knows the man doesn’t need my pity, but I feel driven towards feeling sorry for anyone who has several thousand people calling for their head simply because they’ve noticed that he’s done the same kind of thing he’s always done. I don’t think there’s a single reasonable person there who actually believes that Clarkson wants people to be shot for going on strike, so why do people feel the need to react the way we do? Lord knows we’re not talking about the most subtle of jokes here, but must we be so literal and unsubtle in our reaction?

Update: Just saw an update from BBCBreaking that Clarkson has apologized for the “should be shot” comment.

Grim situation for North Korean civilians gets grimmer

Filed under: Asia, Media, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Strategy Page reports that the North Korean government is trying to distract the population from a declining economy with talk of an invasion from South Korea:

North Korean media is taking an ominous turn. For much of the year, the big story was that everything would change in 2012, with new housing and more of everything. That failed, as it is obvious to all that the 2012 promises are not going to be fulfilled. The new pitch urges North Koreana to eat less and save food. That military is being praised, as is the artillery attack on South Korea (Yeonpyeong Island) a year ago.

The most visible aspects of the 2012 promises (and the centennial of North Korean founder Kim Il Sung) are many new construction projects in the capital. This effort is not only way behind schedule, but is putting up poorly built structures and killing hundreds of students and others who have been conscripted as unskilled labor. The government puts a positive spin on the construction, but darker views get around, despite government efforts to control the news.

While North Koreans are warned about hunger, the government is silent on why they are going to be cold. The government has greatly increased coal exports to China, meaning prices have doubled in some parts of North Korea. The government denies that exports are up sharply, but won’t say anything about the rising prices. Meanwhile, illegal tree cutting is increasingly common as people seek fuel with which to survive the cold weather. Satellite photos show the sharp difference between forestation in the north and south. Foreign aid groups believe that at least three million North Koreans are in danger of starvation. Many more North Koreans are eating less. But many North Koreans are living better. The market economy, but the legal markets and the black market, increasingly thrive.

November 28, 2011

“Newt may be a poor fit for the role of ‘anti-Romney,’ but … he knows how to play the Washington Game”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Gene Healy isn’t a fan of Newt Gingrich as the GOP nominee:

Has it really come to this? Newt Gingrich as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney? That’s what many in the punditocracy have proclaimed as the former speaker of the House has surged recently in the polls.

Yet a look at his record reveals that Newt is hardly the “anti-Mitt” — he’s Mitt Romney with more baggage and bolder hand gestures.

Every Gingrich profile proclaims that he’s a dazzling “ideas man,” a “one-man think tank.” It seems that, if you clamor long enough about “big ideas,” people become convinced you actually have them.

But most of Gingrich’s policy ideas over the last decade have been tepidly conventional and consistent with the Big Government, Beltway Consensus.

Gingrich’s campaign nearly imploded this summer when he dismissed Rep. Paul Ryan’s, R-Wis., Medicare reform plan as “right-wing social engineering.” But that gaffe was a window into Gingrich’s irresponsible approach toward entitlements.

In 2003, Gingrich stumped hard for President George W. Bush’s prescription drug bill, which has added about $17 trillion to Medicare’s unfunded liabilities. “Every conservative member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill,” Newt urged.

And in his 2008 book Real Change, he endorsed an individual mandate for health insurance.

In the same way that we now know that “Santorum” is also the name of an obscure US politician, we are reminded that, back in the 1990s, “Gingrich” wasn’t just the word for the dog turd you had to scrape off the bottom of your shoe.

Charles Stross on worldbuilding for SF stories

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

This is the sort of thing that more science fiction authors should take into account before they write, but not enough seem to do:

So here are some rules of thumb I use, tending towards an increasingly narrow focus. (Sorry if you were expecting me to address the broader uses of confabulation as a fictional tool; this is very much a set of practical guidelines rather than an examination of the theory behind the activity.)

1. Humans are interested in reading fiction about humans.

Constraint #1 on any work of fiction is that it needs to provide an environment in which recognizable human protagonists can exist. If they’re not human (e.g. “Diaspora”, by Greg Egan; “Saturn’s Children”, by me) you need to provide some sort of continuity with the human and give the reader reasons to feel concerned for them. Or you can go for the “they’re not human, don’t look human, and they have no connection with us”, but what you get is either borderline-unreadable at best, or suffers from human-mind-in-a-giant-land-snail-body syndrome (which risks demolishing the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief).

So I’m going to focus on providing a human environment …

2. In general, High Fantasy steals its dress from pre-modern history; Urban Fantasy buys off-the-shelf in TK-Maxx: and Science Fiction goes for that bold futurist look.

Which is to say, if you’re going to write a trilogy with a young soldier on the rise and a throne and an evil emperor, you can do a lot worse than plunder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire for your social background. Note, however, that you’ll do a lot better if you read some social history texts rather than believing what you see in the movies.

That last bit is especially good advice, as the more you know about cultures other than the one you were raised in, the better you can understand why things are different. Ancient Babylonians were not just Englishmen with funny clothes. Classic Greece, for all that it provided a lot of the underpinnings of our western culture, was functionally very different from life as we know it now.

Megan McArdle reviews some recent scolding books on thrift

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:39

Megan McArdle admits right up front that she recently splurged on a very spendy kitchen appliance, so you know she does not number herself among the community of scolds on the topic of thrift:

For decades, Americans have wallowed in credit, shunned savings and delighted in debt. In 1982, the personal savings rate was 10.9% of disposable income, by 2005 it had fallen to just 1.5%. It has since rebounded, but remains a measly 5%.

All this profligacy supports a rather vibrant cottage industry in polemics against consumerism. Authors as varied as the economist Robert H. Frank (1999’s “Luxury Fever”) and the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (2007’s “Consumed”) have ganged up on what they see as the particularly unequal and excessive American spending habits. Unsurprisingly considering their abhorrence of waste, they are avid recyclers; the same arguments, behavioral economics studies and anecdotes appear time and time again. Access to credit makes consumers overspend. Materialistic people are anxious and unhappy. The conspicuous-consumption arms race is unwinnable. Down with status competition! Down with long work weeks, grueling commutes and McMansions! Up with family time, reading and walkable neighborhoods! The effect is rather like strolling down the main tourist strip in a beach town: Each merchant rushes out of his shop, gesticulating wildly and showing you exactly the same thing that you saw at all the previous stores.

The latest person to open up shop on this boardwalk is Baylor marketing professor James A. Roberts. “Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy” runs mostly true to form, its main innovation being to add financial self-help advice to the usual lectures. The book includes not only exhortations but actual instructions—how to make a budget, get out of debt and save for retirement.

It’s a thorough survey of both academic research on consumerism and basic finance advice. Still, I first ran into an argument I hadn’t seen before somewhere around page 200 — that the perfect surfaces of modern products hasten the replacement cycle because they show wear so badly — and well before then Mr. Roberts had fallen into some of the terrible habits of the genre. Though less openly contemptuous of the spendthrift masses than many of his fellow scolds, he still exudes that particular sanctimonious anti-materialism so often found among modestly remunerated professors and journalists.

Here are some of the things that upset him and that “document our preoccupation with status consumption”: Lucky Jeans, bling, Hummers, iPhones, 52-inch plasma televisions, purebred lapdogs, McMansions, expensive rims for your tires, couture, Gulfstream jets and Abercrombie & Fitch. This is a fairly accurate list of the aspirational consumption patterns of a class of folks that my Upper West Side neighbors used to refer to as “these people,” usually while discussing their voting habits or taste in talk radio. As with most such books, considerably less space is devoted to the extravagant excesses of European travel, arts-enrichment programs or collecting first editions.

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