To wrap up the Dale Carnegie Book Club, I’m going to shoot an Ask Me Anything video next week.
Got questions about Carnegie’s classic book?
Want advice about sticky social situations?
Want to know why anyone should listen to me about this despite my admitted social shortcomings?
Just ask in the comments!
Apr 21 2020
I had the great pleasure this afternoon of "seeing" my dear friend and Econlib contributor Alberto Mingardi. In Milan, Mingardi has been under lockdown and witnessing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic longer than most of us. He says Italians are currently experiencing the greatest restriction in their personal li...
Apr 21 2020
One of the wisest things ever said about poetry was said by the Canadian poet Tom Wayman in his poem “What Good Poems are For.” Wayman describes a man who is so moved by a poem “about work he did, what he knew about,/ written by somebody like himself” that he takes it from table to table in a dive bar, reading ...
Apr 21 2020
To wrap up the Dale Carnegie Book Club, I'm going to shoot an Ask Me Anything video next week. Got questions about Carnegie's classic book? Want advice about sticky social situations? Want to know why anyone should listen to me about this despite my admitted social shortcomings? Just ask in the comments!
READER COMMENTS
DarlG
Apr 21 2020 at 9:54am
I’ve never read How to Win Friends and Influence People because I’m concerned that it’ll make me too self-conscious of social-dynamics while I’m interacting with people, and thus ultimately be harmful to me. Change my mind!
Tim
Apr 21 2020 at 7:06pm
Certainly was true for me when I watched videos on body language and “getting charisma” as a teenager. This book is written on a higher abstraction level, though, and since reading it the first time about 7 years ago, I haven’t experienced anything like that. It’s not about micromanaging your social behaviour like those videos were, it’s about making you a genuinely nice person to have a relationship with.
Tim
Apr 21 2020 at 7:17pm
How did you make the changes described in the book in practice? Did you just consciously try to keep it in your mind when you talked to someone or did you go about it in some other way?
Do you think the examples are out-dated? It always seemed to me like he just happened to stumble across people that were especially starved for recognition, and that the people in my life didn’t respond quite as positively to me talking about their interests.
Perhaps it’s just because I’m not as good a conversationalist, or maybe even not as genuinely interested as he was, but often when I try to inquire someone about something I know they spend a lot of time on, they aren’t that eager to talk about it.
Big fan, btw! Looking forward to your next book, whether on housing or poverty!
Jason Ford
Apr 21 2020 at 11:44pm
One of the many things I admire about your work is your willingness to take on the toughest arguments of the other side. In “Open Borders”, for example, you didn’t shy away from discussing issues such as I.Q. levels, cultural unity, and welfare spending.
So in that spirit, I thought it would be interesting to discuss some criticisms of Carnegie. Sinclair Lewis said Carnegie’s advice was “to smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.” I personally do not agree with Lewis’s criticism, but it raises some interesting questions:
Does Carnegie encourage inauthentic behavior?
If the answer to question one is “yes”, does it matter?
My answers would be “somewhat” and “not that much.” What do you think?
Jason Ford
Apr 24 2020 at 12:34pm
I’ve been thinking more about authenticity as it relates to Carnegie and culture in general and I’d love to hear your general thoughts on the subject. If you feel it’s straying too far from Carnegie, never mind.
Let’s say a high school announced that all students had to dress up for graduation and one student said they weren’t dressing up because “it isn’t who I am.” In 2020, that would most likely be taken seriously. In 1936 when this Carnegie book was written, that student would be treated as if he announced he was from Mars.
Carnegie doesn’t address authenticity in part, I suspect, because it wasn’t a significant issue then. A general criticism of the business world is that it encourages people to be fake to get jobs, promotions, and sales. Carnegie doesn’t address any problem with fakery. I suspect he doesn’t see it as a problem.
My view is that authenticity is overrated in our current time. The search for who one “ really is” leads to narcissism and bad relations. Maybe it’s better to be “phony” to get along with people. What do you think?
Art Carden
Apr 22 2020 at 8:23pm
Best Carnegie practices for dealing with misbehaving or just-not-listening kids? Appealing to their lovely adulthood if they embrace virtue now sometimes creates unnecessary tension.
Denver
Apr 23 2020 at 7:42am
Whenever I see a video of you in a debate, you manage to put a smile on your face, laugh, and keep things jovial. Even if you vehemently disagree with your opponent.
When I try and debate like this my body reacts on a visceral level, and I spend a great deal of energy just trying to keep myself from getting upset, even though the rational part of my brain knows there is nothing to be upset about. Which, in turn, makes it difficult to implement Carnegie’s advice. Which, in turn, makes me less persuasive.
So, how do you manage to overcome these visceral reactions, and say what’s on your mind in a jovial and polite manner?
Robert Tucker Omberg
Apr 23 2020 at 1:33pm
Thanks for the great series!
I’m wondering why these techniques aren’t more ubiquitous among employers and managers? Pleasant bosses who follow Carnegie’s advice, especially the principles you discuss in Part 4 of the book club, could offer lower wages than more abrasive ones, giving them stronger incentives than most to adopt them. You’ve pointed out throughout your posts that following Carnegie’s principles is hardly costly, but nearly everyone has had a boss who revels in shaming or humiliating their employees. Do bosses just value their ability to do this more than they would save on compensating differentials? Does following Carnegie’s advice earn workers’ affection at the expense of their productivity? Something else entirely? I’m interested to hear what you think.
Francis
Apr 23 2020 at 3:13pm
Two questions. One serious, one funny.
To some degree you have avoided following Carnegie’s rules by instead finding your “beautiful bubble”, but one also needs some social skills to craft such a bubble in the first place. For those who wish to focus on cultivating a bubble-life, which of Carnegie’s principles are most important for ingratiating yourself into a bubble, and which are more important for social skills outside such bubbles?
Two perfect Carnegiean Conversationalists meet. Does their conversation go anywhere, or do they circularly try to find and engage the others interests? Likewise, must a perfect Bayesian and a perfect Carnegiean always agree?
Sean
Apr 24 2020 at 9:17am
This has been such an enjoyable series – I look forward to returning to it, and to the book itself, over time!
Some quick qs:
I know you’ve studied and written about the the Big 5 personality traits.
1. I wonder how you process these principles in light of that literature – if, for example, you were homeschooling your kids on Carnegie, and they had widely differing personalities measured along the Big 5, how would you differentiate your instruction?
More specifically: If you had a kid who was high on agreeableness, high on extroversion, and low on neuroticism (i.e. warm, calm, and easy to be around – but susceptible to being taken advantage of, perhaps) – would you nudge, in fact, AWAY from Carnegie? Or is there something for that personality profile to apply?
2. Related – an arm-chaired Straussian read is that your readership is, on average, 1.5 SDs more disagreeable (i.e. willing to productively challenge the status quo but perhaps not collegially) than the population… and that some Carnegie 101 may in fact nudge THEM towards more pro-social behavior, so that some ideas that are outside the mainstream (that this community cherishes – open borders, etc.) get a fairer hearing.
You’ve written before about how libertarians need to be nicer. Is this in some way a nod towards that?
Ramchandra Apte
Apr 26 2020 at 1:02am
Do you feel like Carnegie’s advice makes one inauthentic? Is it kind of a “fake it until you make it” thing? Also, how do you balance being honest and forthright with his advice?
steve marino
Apr 26 2020 at 6:32am
Thanks for the series. Do you think Carnegie’s methods are equally effective for men and women? I’m especially thinking in terms of ‘competence/likeability trade-off bias’. In asking around about Carnegie’s book, I had more than one woman tell me that if/when they apply techniques like these in dealings with men, the default reaction in many cases is that these gestures are taken a signals that the woman is interested in having sex with the man.
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