THE LAW OF SMALL NUMBERS
Imagine you're a graphic designer or marketing executive who's heard me speak and wants to buy The Substance of Style. You go to Amazon to look for the book, and on the page you find a truly unexpected list of presumably similar books:
Customers who bought this book also bought:
- The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress by Virginia Postrel, Virgia Postrel (Hardcover)
- Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens (Hardcover)
- Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism by Brink Lindsey (Author) (Hardcover)
- The Gallery of Regrettable Food by James Lileks (Hardcover)
- Mexifornia: A State of Becoming by Victor Davis Hanson (Hardcover)
What on earth is going on? What does The Substance of Style have to do with Orwell, or immigration, or trade, or regrettable food????
You, dear blog readers, undoubtedly know the answer: These are all books purchased online by people who read blogs. Because a relatively small number of purchases can change which books overlap, Amazon purchasing patterns may--or may not--mirror more general book-buying patterns. When I interviewed Austan Goolsbee for my recent NYT column, he told me about a children's book he and a colleague often buy as a baby gift. From time to time, the Amazon recommendations on its page include not just children's books but titles like The Economics of New Goods, a (quite interesting and influential) volume put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Not exactly kiddie lit.