Big Ideas May Not Make Big Books?

Author Kathryn Shultz, who confesses she has written a book of her own that strays in the the Big Idea domain, reviews a Big Idea book by Tina Rosenberg and calls into question the whole, uh, idea of the Big Idea book.

In brief, she wonders how Rosenberg, who wrote a history of Eastern Europe under communism, could write a book about the use of social group pressure to obtain positive results. To oversimplify, communist governments relied heavily on social group pressure to keep their people in line. Any time an individual or a group acted up, the resulting use of force to rein them in would probably spill over to people who'd never been involved in the revolt. So people just as miserable as the miscreants would often inform on them in order to keep themselves safe and help the government keep everyone in line.

Shultz asks if the main difference between the social pressure Rosenberg affirms and the social pressure she objects to is that one aims towards an approved goal while the other one does not. If so, who gets to approve the goals? Today's society, for example, may pressure men who think women should remain second-class citizens in the workplace so that they don't act on their wishes. But what if society changes and instead pressures women to not seek top jobs? Is social pressure still a good thing? Shultz thinks that social pressure has a place in an ordered society, but most people should make most decisions thinking for themselves.

Then she branches out to note that Rosenberg has essentially written what she calls a Big Idea book -- books that sort of typify the problems social pressure can create. In a Big Idea book, someone has an original idea or ideas that they synthesize from a study or encounter with interesting new data or understandings. The book then tries to not only explain the new idea but demonstrate how the idea itself explains either 1) everything else or 2) everything else inside a specific field of existence, like dating, child-raising or marketing a company. If the buzz about the book is powerful enough, then it begins to create social pressure to accept its idea. At least until the next Big Idea book comes along that presses in a different direction or draws its "counter-intuivity" from being directly opposite of the previous big idea.

I often enjoy essays or articles that dig into human behavior or other aspects of our existence in peculiar ways or from new angles. But I think Shultz nails it -- most of the time the books that often grow out of these essays try to carry their new idea or angle too far. And in the process of growing from a few thousand words into two or three hundred pages they lose the exploratory character that makes them interesting to think about -- in order to get to book size, the author may have to do all the thinking for you and that's not nearly as fun.