The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value Paperback – Illustrated, 1 September 2008

A wonderful book with clearly thought out arguments and illustrations: one of its kind.

Book is interesting and full examples from science and a variety of cultural markets.However, the content does not justify the title "economics".Readers can draw a lot from this reading but will not learn much about the economic thinking about awards, status, prestige, uncertainty, and inequality.

A fascinating subject but a painfully slogging read. In fact, almost unreadable. The good: some amusing gossip about feuds and hissy fits among the pretentious, inbred literary elite. Especially Toni Morrison, the world's most overrated writer, who wouldn't even be a trivia question if she weren't black. And about the British Booker [book] prize and some other prizes. And some entertaining trivia about the Nobel prizes, the Olympics and movie festivals.The bad: stupefying bad writing. The author never uses a short word where five long ones will do. This type can never say "use" when he can say "utilize" or "the utilization of." He also apparently has never heard of short sentences or paragraph breaks, since he favors page-long paragraphs. I put some random passages into readability tests like the Gunning Fog Index and they are off the charts; poster children for unreadable writing. Some parts are written at such a high level of abstraction that the book sounds like a parody of academic blather. The subject is intrinsically fascinating. The author makes it dull.The book is also marred in places by the author's leftist bias. For example, he indulges in an intemperate and false tirade against, supposedly, Reagan's and Bush's minion's reaction to imaginary racial bias in favor of minorities. He fails to acknowledge that there was, and is, an actual and pervasive racial spoils system in the "Awards Economy" and elsewhere, especially in academia. Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and many other blacks have been lionized mainly because they were blacks. If they were white, no one would have cared about their books.One very practical aspect of the book, however, although certainly not the one intended. If the reader is organizing a pretentious literary prize or competition, there are lots of ideas here to copy. Even a list of preposterously pretentious organization and prize names to help he reader generate ideas...

The text itself is interesting, but the something went wrong when they turned the text into an ebook. It won't allow me to highlight or take notes, and the formatting on the screen is incredibly wonky.