W. David Marx Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

W. David Marx

Very honored that the great @vpostrel reviewed "Status and Culture" in the @WSJ Quite coincidentally I just read Postrel's "The Substance of Style" and sensed she would object to my argument that status shapes how we take *pleasure* from culture... 🧵 https://t.co/Gy5q4c5N6T

W. David Marx

Newsletter this week: Reading "The Elephant in the Brain" in response to Tyler Cowen's diss-blurb of my book, and why I'm suspicious of using "ape-brain" as the primary way to explain complex human social behaviors such as art, status, and culture. https://t.co/unPaIyApSa

W. David Marx

Very honored that the great @vpostrel reviewed "Status and Culture" in the @WSJ Quite coincidentally I just read Postrel's "The Substance of Style" and sensed she would object to my argument that status shapes how we take *pleasure* from culture... 🧵 https://t.co/Gy5q4c5N6T

W. David Marx

25. Marshall Sahlins - Culture and Practical Reason 26. Clyde Kluckhohn - Culture and Behavior Two sophisticated works of anthropology that try to examine what culture *is.* Sahlins is very lucid about how culture takes on value in contemporary society (it's not all economics) https://t.co/MIY2n7tb0A

W. David Marx

23. Jon Elster - Explaining Social Behavior 24. George Homans - Social Behaviour Indispensable books that help you think about the motivated individual interactions at heart of social behavior. (Elster's entire catalog is worth a read, including his explanations of Marxism.) https://t.co/rdW3zvMsh2

W. David Marx

1. Thorstein Veblen - The Theory of the Leisure Class Foundational text for understanding taste as an economic process: namely, the inevitability of New Money engaging in conspicuous consumption. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but his arguments are more nuanced than often portrayed. https://t.co/jK1OcQP49T

W. David Marx

Excellent to hear the brilliant status scholar Cecilia Ridgeway on the Ezra Klein Show @ezraklein https://t.co/vvN9drXdyw

W. David Marx

9. Jean Baudrillard - The System of Objects 10. Jean Baudrillard - The Consumer Society 11. Jean Baudrillard - For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign Essential philosophical works on consumerism and its political implications. ("sign value" = "status value") https://t.co/SWqvwkZVys

W. David Marx

21. Edna Ullmann-Margalit - The Emergence of Norms 22. Margaret Gilbert - On Social Facts Two books that ingeniously examine the emergence of social norms from the perspective of game theory and conventions. https://t.co/lzuSsXYBLV

W. David Marx

Thomas Frank's The Conquest of Cool is a great cultural history, especially in showing how the ad industry didn't pander to the '60s counterculture but helped *create* it. Hippie-aesthetic advertising predates the hippies. https://t.co/pK60QbwjCM