This paper by Jonathan Toubol (“The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists all Look the Same”) has been getting a lot of play yesterday and today. Setting aside all the cutesy math, the basic dynamic driving his model is, as far as I can tell, exactly the one that Andrew Potter and I described in The Rebel Sell. What I find particularly interesting is the role that delay plays in his model, since Andrew and I also argued that delayed propagation of style was a major force sustaining counterculture, again for exactly the reason that Toubol represents. This was the basis of our contention that, because cable television, and subsequently internet, significantly reduced delay in propagation, counterculture was becoming more difficult to sustain.

On his website, Toubol points out that he was not trying to make a contribution to sociological theory. So I am not faulting him in observing that there is one crucial component of the phenomenon (“anticonformists all look the same”) that he fails to explain: Why are there only two states for the population types to switch back and forth between?… Continue reading

Je n’ai pas contribué depuis un certain temps à IDC. J’ai commencé à bloguer sur le site Internet de L’actualité. J’ai abordé jusqu’ici des questions comme la prière à l’hôtel de ville de Saguenay, le financement des écoles privées et le dernier livre de Jean-François Lisée. Je ne sais trop ce que l’avenir me réserve. IDC est un formidable laboratoire pancanadien d’éthique et de philosophie politique appliquées. L’actualité publie du contenu de grande qualité sur son site et est une référence incontournable pour ceux qui suivent les débats politiques québécois. Je pourrai y poursuivre ma lutte pour le changement graduel qui survient au moment opportun!… Continue reading

The goldenrod is blooming. Many people associate this with going back to school. And it is indeed that time of year.

Personally, whenever I see goldenrod I think of Thorstein Veblen. Specifically, The Theory of the Leisure Class, where he makes the following, fantastic observation:

By further habituation to an appreciative perception of the marks of expensiveness in goods, and by habitually identifying beauty with reputability, it comes about that a beautiful article which is not expensive is accounted not beautiful. In this way it has happened, for instance, that some beautiful flowers pass conventionally for offensive weeds; others that can be cultivated with relative ease are accepted and admired by the lower middle class, who can afford no more expensive luxuries of this kind; but these varieties are rejected as vulgar by those people who are better able to pay for expensive flowers and who are educated to a higher schedule of pecuniary beauty in the florist’s products; while still other flowers, of no greater intrinsic beauty than these, are cultivated at great cost and call out much admiration from flower-lovers whose tastes have been matured under the critical guidance of a polite environment.

I’m going to be doing an “ask me anything” session this Tuesday, Sept. 9, from 1-3pm (EST) for the folks on the CanadaPolitics subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaPolitics).

For those of you who don’t follow it, CanadaPolitics offers an excellent “curated” overview of Canadian news from multiple sources, and is ruthlessly moderated in order to ensure the highest quality discussion. I check it at least once a day, and so I’m happy to be able to give something back to the community there.

Personally, I’m having difficulty believing that anyone is going to show up for this, so if you have a chance, save me some embarrassment and come ask a question!… Continue reading