The Iron Yuppie

Tim Worstall: Tim Lambert, Glenn Reynolds and Bookselling.

I thought this was a kind of cool analysis. First, I'm surprised at the consistent level of conspiracy theory that seems to permeate the blogsphere. People need to have a better understanding of coincidence and how common things are before they go nuts on how x or y is out to get me/my affiliated party/my group/etc.

Second, if it’s true, there could be any number of reasons that left wing books get more display time than right wing books: it goes in cycles, and this is a left wing cycle; they actually get the exact same amount of display and you only notice the left wing books because you do not like them as much and you have a higher emotional reaction to them, thereby improving your memory that a left wing book was displayed; left wing people are more likely to be defacers and would damage the books displayed if they were right wing; and so on. My take is because I think that publishers think that left leaning people are more likely to buy books and so are willing to pay the money to get them slotted. But that’s just my take. My real problem with this whole line of discussion is that they’ve taken a single example (someone’s observation about their book store), combined it with a fake posting and a conspiracy theory has been created. I do not even think it is accurate; wasn't Unfit for Command at the top of the NY Times Best Seller list for a number of weeks?

For all the touting that the various blog folks do about how in depth and thorough the blogsphere is, bloggers seem to forget to know anything about basic statistics and research. Maybe this is a more general human phenomenon and it is simply exhibited extremely well here. Either way, two web pages does not a conspiracy make.