Friday Interview: Glamour Helps Guide Our Decisions | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The authors of this post are the CJ Staff of the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

Author, columnist Virginia Postrel focuses on powerful, fragile force

    RALEIGH  -  Glamour can play an important role in our decision-making process. Despite that fact, few people devoted much research time to glamour's impact until author and columnist Virginia Postrel produced the book The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. Postrel shared her findings recently with a John Locke Foundation audience. Postrel also discussed glamour with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: Before we get into the power of glamour, why did you decide this was a topic that was worthy of a book?

    Postrel: Well, that's a very interesting question because I never would have thought that I would write a book about glamour. I was always interested in the unglamorous side of things. I always say, you know, I was interested in supply chain management and the nitty-gritty of how business works or how the world in general works.

    And my previous book, The Substance of Style, you might think was related, but that is actually about bringing style into things that are not traditionally stylish. It's 10 years old, but things like computer electronics, you know, consumer electronics, or business hotels, things that today we take for granted  -  but, again, not glamorous.

    So what was interesting? I got asked to write an essay about glamour in 2004, and as I delved into the topic, I got very interested in this phenomenon. What is it? What do all the things we call glamorous ... what do they have in common?

    It's not a particular style. It's not a particular domain. And then, once I started answering those questions  -  and this is before I necessarily started writing a book  -  once I started answering those questions, I became aware of how incredibly influential glamour is and how it affects everything from not just, you know, things we buy  -  it's used a lot in commerce  -  to how we vote and what careers we pursue, where we decide to live  -  you know, big decisions. So it's a very rich subject and very interesting.

    Kokai: I understand that much of the book is devoted to showing what actually is glamorous versus what is not, but that some people might think is glamorous. Is that true?

    Postrel: What the book does is it tries to give people a kind of intellectual infrastructure, as I call it. So it has a lot of delving into things. What is glamour? What does it do? What are the three elements that all forms of glamour have? And another thing that it does that people have really enjoyed is it distinguishes between glamour and, say, charisma, glamour and things that are similar to but not the same as glamour.

    And the charisma thing people love partly because there is this little chart that says, you know, "Glamorous: Barack Obama. Charismatic: Bill Clinton. Glamorous: Jackie Kennedy. Charismatic: Eleanor Roosevelt." And as well as, you know, "Glamorous: Mr. Spock. Charismatic: Captain Kirk."

    I mean, there are some lighter things, too, to it and trying to look at the difference between glamour, which is really more something that you feel, versus charisma, which is something that you have, that is a personal quality.

    Kokai: People who listen to this show would probably be interested in many of the topics you discussed at the beginning of the interview because we talk about tax rates and school choice and environmental policy. Why should people who are public policy wonks or who are interested in those hard topics also pay attention to glamour?

    Postrel: I actually think glamour has a huge influence on public policy because both world-views and specific policies take on glamour, as well as individual candidates occasionally. That's rarer. So an idea of the green economy or the American dream or free enterprise or, you know, in the early 20th century, various ideas of planning were incredibly glamorous.

    These ideas become glamorous, and then what glamour does is glamour can be very useful. I think it can be either a positive or a negative. It's not something I'm for or against. I mean, I'm interested in understanding it.

    But the thing about glamour is it always contains an element of illusion. It hides costs. It hides details. It hides distractions. It gives you, you know, the picture that you want to project yourself into and think, "If life could only be like that. ..." And that can be very inspiring. It can be very positive in an individual's life. But when you bring it into the public policy sphere, it often hides the details that actually are going to be what it's like to experience that policy.

    And so we often talk about the knowledge problem, you know, all those details that the people on the spot know, they tend to get left out of the glamorous image, whether that's a glamorous image of high-speed rail or interstate highways. There's a lot of glamour in architectural renderings, both in the private sector and the public sector.

    Or recently, you know, whatever one may think of Obamacare, the problems that they had with the website were very much, I think, a product of the glamorous images that we see of databases on TV, where on "CSI" or "Hawaii Five-0," you know, there's these magical databases that just  -  everything is instantaneous, and all the difficulties of what it takes to put together something like that, especially in a context where it's not like Amazon or Travelocity incrementally innovating over time, it's with a legislative mandate, that got left out of the beautiful picture in President Obama's head.

    And so he and many other people were surprised. So even people who supported the policy were surprised by the implementation details because, I think, they were seduced by glamour.

    Kokai: In the time that we have remaining, if someone is seduced by glamour, how hard is it to then get facts in front of them that say, "As glamorous as this may be, this is not the way to go"?

    Postrel: Right. Well, the interesting thing about glamour is glamour is fragile because it often is the case that with experience things that seem glamorous either become negative or just boring. And that's not just public policy. That could be, you know, you get your dream job, and you like your dream job, but it's still your job, and it's not so exciting anymore.

    So, unfortunately, the main antidote is experience, not having things pointed out to you, especially if you really are enjoying the glamorous fantasy. But, you know, pointing things out, telling stories.

    The trick is, I think, the two great ways to puncture glamour aside from experience are humor and horror. And I think in the public policy field people immediately resort to horror, to saying, you know, "What's being hidden is really the worst thing you can imagine." And I think that's less persuasive than something that is either more mundane or, if you can do it, funny.