Customer Reviews

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This fascinating tour of the sociology of extremism provides a general description of its impact on society and describes specific tactics for leaders and managers who want to foster open discussion while promoting a democratic workplace. Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein addresses polarization by presenting results from numerous studies. Polarization affects every group interaction, including those of lawyers, judges, doctors, elected officials and the military. getAbstract recommends this book to those interested in promoting open discussions or in preventing pathologies that create mob behaviors and even genocide.

The book starts with something we all know, that it is more pleasant to talk with people that agree with you than with those that disagree with you. What we do not realize is that by acting this way we become "polarized". As all agree with what we think we start to believe that what we think is true. The author Cass Sunstein does an excellent job to make you aware of this happening and the consequences.

An extreme example is terrorists that form groups with extreme polarization. Most of these terrorists have experienced moral outrage, personal experience of discrimination, economic exclusion, even though many are well educated and come from middle-class families.

Polarization can be bad but also good like overthrowing the Lenin Communist system in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, or abolishing slavery in the United States.

The author presents his view as to what can be done to avoid bad polarization and tolerate good polarization. He believes the only answer is free speech and tolerance; acceptance and respect for diverse views, for diversity. He points out that dictatorships are breeding grounds for terrorism. Polarized groups objecting to dictatorships do not trust what the dictatorships claim to be the truth. Discrimination and outrage do the rest.

It is also relevant for business. Leaders that act like dictators will before or after their death ruin the company. A board of directors must contain members with different perspectives that forcefully argue with each other and management. Also at the level of management vigorous arguments about different perspectives are essential. What the author omits is the importance that after vigorous argument in boards and management a decision taken must be supported 100% by all the members of the board and of top management.

The book also enriches your vocabulary and concepts with words like: conspiracy entrepreneur, interactive echo-chamber, first and second order diversity, enclave deliberation, public forum doctrine, informational cascade and more.

Finally the book gets off to a slow start but towards the end it becomes exciting to read.
The Leader's Way: Business, Buddhism and Happiness in an Interconnected World

Sunstein will soon run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This Agency conducts cost benefit analysis of regulations. So, it is interesting to know Sunstein mindset. Sunstein is also the coauthor of the excellent Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness where he fleshes out his political philosophy of Liberal Paternalism. After reading those two books, you get a feeling that the OIRA will be in extremely capable hands. Sunstein has a powerful and inquisitive intellect. He is also an excellent writer as his books are very easy to read despite covering rather dry topics.

Homogeneous groups polarize as they cause like-minded people to strengthen their positions by eliminating the balancing safeguard from diverging opinions. Sunstein demonstrates that no category individuals is exempt from this behavior. Even Federal judges were victim of it as their verdict were politically more polarized when they belonged to an homogeneous political panel (all three Judges from same political party) vs when they were not.

Regarding risk taking endeavors, if individuals are moderate risk avoiders after deliberating they will become more so. If they are moderate risk takers, the group will render them more extreme risk takers.

Group polarization occurs because individuals only exchange information that reinforces their initial views and exclude info that does not. Group polarization is stealthy. You join a group of like-minded people. You approve of what they say. Before you know it they turned you into an extremist.

The Bush Administration was an insular polarizing group. Independent views were not solicited. A better model is Abraham Lincoln "Team of Rivals" that Obama is emulating. Here independent minded experts are nominated to create an internal debate with a broad range of opinions. Similarly, well functioning corporate boards contain clashing viewpoints and challenging questions. These points are a tribute to the power of checks and balances including the value of creating Teams of Rivals even in domains in which leaders usually seek team players.

Local communities are subject to polarization as people cluster into areas of like-minded people and become adamant about our political views as depicted by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Similarly, corporations are polarizing groups where employees are exaggerating the positive outlook of their employers and are dismissive of competitors.

Group polarization can go terribly wrong. Sunstein explains the Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, terrorism, Abu Ghraib abuses through group polarization leading to violent extremism. He refers to the social experiments of Milgram, where normal people gave others really high electric shocks just to answer questions. He also refers to Zimbardo Stanford Prison experiment where students were divided in two groups: guards and prisoners. The guards became so cruel, the experiment was aborted to preserve the welfare of the "prisoners." The underlying finding is that given circumstances moral people can do horrible things. This issue has triggered a debate between the "dispositionists" and the "situationists." The dispositionists believe cruelty is a matter of individual disposition. The situationists believe it is a matter of situation. This is a Nature vs Nurture argument. Milgram and Zimbardo experiments are red flags that normal people can become cruel. However, people did observe "good" guards that were not cruel in the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib. But, where these few saints exceptions that confirm the rule? To study this further, read Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Sunstein also connects the dots between group polarization and Irving Janis Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. The two concepts overlap. But, he states that group polarization better explains extremism (moving one's opinion towards an extreme) than groupthink. But, in many group decisions the two concepts are identical.

Sunstein indicates information cascades cause investment bubbles. Robert Shiller calls them social contagion; whereby we start believing something because everybody else does. In the late 90s, we thought the sky was the limit for Internet stocks. See Shiller Irrational Exuberance. Just three years later we jumped into the next information cascade: home prices always go up. See Shiller The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It.

Information cascades also entail peer pressure. He calls those reputational cascades. You are afraid to hold a diverging opinion from the consensus so as to not become socially ostracized. He uses the global warming view that it will produce catastrophic harm in the very near term as an example. Such a reputational cascade was typefied by Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. Bjorn Lomborg wrote a balanced rebuttal Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming (Vintage). But, the rhetorical debate was over before it began. Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' became a worldwide reputational cascade recompensing Gore with a Nobel Price and an Oscar Award. Meanwhile, Bjorn Lomborg remained in obscurity outside of Denmark.

Sunstein covers terrorism in depth. He refers to the excellent work of Krueger in What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (New Edition) indicating that terrorists are not who we think. They are well educated often middle class and not mentally ill. But, they often live in societies that lack civil rights and liberties. And, terrorism becomes a last resort form of political protest for the ones who are inclined to violence (the disposisionist argument resurfaces). Group polarization within terrorist groups plays a huge role. Per Sunstein terrorists are not born, they are normal individuals who become polarized.

To prevent group polarization, Sunstein promotes free flow of information so that a group checks its position against external references, conducting cost-benefit analysis. Group diversity is also key so diverging opinions are expressed.

Sunstein explains the The Wisdom of Crowds with the Condercet Jury theorem. Groups generate better overall decisions than individuals so long as the Majority rule is used and each person is more likely than not to be correct. If either of those conditions are not met than group decisions are worst than individuals.

Dictatorships are less successful than democracies in war because democracies have better access to information. Careful studies show that democracies do well in fighting wars in part because they do not start wars if they are not likely to win them.

This is a book about people with views to the far right or far left. It cites some interesting studies on human behavior. For example, one study concludes that when people of one extreme or the other get together, they are even more extreme after they meet than they were before. The extremism feeds on itself and makes itself stronger. So when people on the right interact only with other people on the right, they go farther to the right; when people on the left interact only with other people on the left, they go farther to the left. Also, when people with a very strong interest in a topic are faced with contrary evidence, instead of moderating their views they become even stronger in their views to withstand it. Hardly earth-shattering, given the current polarized political climate, but the studies are interesting.

Sunstein's "solution" to this is a Public Forum Doctrine that is somewhat reminiscent of the Fairness Doctrine. Cass Sunstein thinks that the state should "nudge" people towards correct behavior. Sunstein co-wrote a book called "Nudge" about that tactic; he also wrote a book about FDR that praised him most effusively for the New Deal. "Nudge" is a "Tipping Point" kind of book with a blurb by the Freakonomics author. Those who implement "nudging" are called "choice architects".

Sunstein labels himself a proponent of "libertarian paternalism", an oxymoronic term that means the state should not regulate behavior, but should use persuasion (obvious or hidden) to direct behavior--AKA "soft paternalism" or "asymmetrical paternalism". This reminded me of those books popular in the 70s about subliminal advertising.

Sunstein received a law degree from Harvard, taught in Chicago, has been a friend and advisor to Obama for years, and was announced as Obama's "regulation czar". (Or, I guess, the "National Choice Architect".) But he has not yet been confirmed, mostly because of statements such as this: "I will suggest that animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law," which have caused politicians in farming states to oppose him.

You can see why conservatives may disagree with Sunstein's ideas. However, progressives aren't always thrilled with Sunstein either, because he has some libertarian, anti-regulatory ideas, salted with a little free-trade economics. But this should make Sunstein more appealing to open-minded moderates and conservatives, and the book is worth reading -- unless you belong to one of the extremes and won't be influenced by competing ideas.

Cass Sunstein is a public intellectual who creatively combines scholarship, popular writing, and public service. He is an advisor to President Barack Obama, and has moved from his position as Professor at Harvard Law School to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. His wife, Samatha Power, is a human rights and genocide expert advising the Obama administration.

Sunstein's specialty is behavioral decision theory, for which Princeton
psychologist Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel prize in Economics in 2002. Behavioral decision theorists have shown that in laboratory settings, people do not form beliefs using rational deliberation alone. Going to Extremes is based on evidence that when like-minded people interact, their views become even more extreme. For instance, subjects in one experiment were asked their opinions on such controversial issues as global warming, abortion, and gay marriage. Those who self-identified as `liberal' were then asked to form one group to discuss these issues, while those who self-identified as `conservative' formed a second group. After fifteen minutes of discussion, virtually all the liberals became more liberal and the conservatives became more conservative.

Sunstein concludes from this and a mass of other evidence that people tend to seek others with similar ideas, and the process of interaction with the like-minded gives rise to "group polarization." His key example is religious terrorism, perpetrated by young men who pray together, meet together, plan together, read the same materials, and reinforce the legitimacy of one another's complaints, generating an unwarranted justification for their violent intentions and an unwarranted optimism in
their ability to succeed.

Going to Extremes is also a cautionary tale for the incoming President Obama. President George W. Bush had been widely criticized for his handling of the Iraq occupation in the years following the fall of Saddam Hussein, especially for failing to supply sufficient troupes and equipment to the Iraq rebuilding initiative. Bush's failure to entertain this criticism was often attributed by the Democratic opposition to his team of advisors being hand-picked for their willingness to accept the "party line" of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Eventually, President Bush replaced Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense in early November, 2006, but only after the disastrous Republican defeat in 2006 mid-term elections. After extensive consultation with experts, in early January 2007, President Bush authorized a dramatic increase in troupe levels in Iraq.

Sunstein argues that it is a sign of good leadership to have a diversity of advisory opinion so that executive policy does not become irrevocably committed to a single course of action, unwavering despite the unfolding of historical events. By maintaining a small group of people all committed to one viewpoint, Bush's advisors moved to a position more extreme, and less tenable, than any advisor would have held in isolation.

It would be auspicious indeed if the generation of collective false beliefs were largely the product of the sorts of self-segregation described in Sunstein's laboratory experiments. Such, however, is not the case. "Belief contagion," even in the absence of self-segregation, often leads large numbers of people to accept outlandish notions for which there is no credible evidence. For example, in the mid-twentieth century psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim asserted, with only the most perfunctory anecdotal evidence, that autism was caused by "cold mothers." Psychologists and psychiatrists from the 1960's to 1980's widely endorsed Bettelheim's view, leading to years of victimizing the mothers of autistic children and misdirecting therapeutic energies. This view is now commonly regarded as erroneous.

A more recent example of runaway belief contagion is the late-twentieth century preoccupation with "recovered memories," leading to numerous prosecutions for sexual abuse in various parts of the United States based mainly on rehearsed child testimony and irregular court proceedings. Consider the McMartin family, who ran a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. They were jailed for sexual abuse in 1984, and subjected to criminal trial beginning in 1987. The ordeal began when the mother of a student charged a McMartin teacher with sodomizing her son. The police sent the parents of all students in the school a sexually explicit letter suggesting that their children may have been abused. The ensuing hysteria led to a crescendo of allegations, seven McMartin family members and staff being arrested on 321 counts of child abuse involving 48 children. Following six years of investigation and trial, all charges were dropped in 1990, no credible evidence having been found supporting any of the 321 counts.

Prejudice is a far more potent generator of false beliefs that self-segregation. Anti-black sentiments were widely fueled in the post-bellum South by self-seeking politicians and rag newspapers. Nazi politicians spread anti-Semitic stories for political reasons, but prejudice rendered these stories plausible.

Going to Extremes is a fine book chock full of insightful evidence and intelligent commentary on modern political life. Sunstein's vision of emancipatory political discourse (a vision championed by the great modern philosopher Juergen Habermas) is salutary, and the world would probably be a better place if we followed it. However, I think most voters in America do not self-select into extreme positions, political polarization in the USA is probably weaker now that in the past century, and terrorism is an effective tactic (albeit of dubious moral status) for non-state actors with political goals.

A test subject walks into a room. In the room there are four other "test subjects" (agent provoceteurs) sitting near a projector. The machine projects an image of three lines onto the wall. The lines are similar in length, but one is objectively shorter than the other two. The test subject is asked to decide which of the lines is shortest, if any, and she must discuss with the group. The four other members of the group (actually hired by the experimenter) all agree that the lines are the same length. The test subject does a double take of the projection, then she squints hard at it. She could have sworn that the one on the right was shorter than the others, but then again she has poor eyesight, she says to her self. She ends up agreeing with the four others. Every Psych 101 student is familiar with stories like this one, and almost everyone is familiar with the famous Milgram experiment. Such experiments show how and when an individual can be pushed to falsity and/or extremes.

Author Cass Sunstein is a prominent voice in the behavioral economics field (he is co-author of Nudge) and hence well qualified to write Going to Extremes, a short book on social psychology. The book examines how groups can polarize as well as the circumstances under which groups refrain form polarization. Sunstein gives three good examples of polarization in the early part of his book: Federal judge panels (made of three judges) are more likely to polarize when a panel's ideology is homogeneous; that is, when there are three democratically inclined judges on a panel, the panel's decision is more likely to be strongly in favor of liberal policies, and vice versa with conservative inclined panel. When a panel is characterized with a 2:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives (and vice versa) the decision is likely to be far less polarized. When deliberating punishments, a jury as a group is likely to deliberate to extremes vis a vis individual jurors; that is, an individual juror might merely think of meting out a monetary punishment of $10,000, but after a group deliberation, a jury proper will move to an "extreme" and either decide on a punishment of $50,000 or $1,000. The third example is perhaps most telling and familiar: researchers formed small citizen groups with citizens from the Colorado cities of Boulder and Colorado Springs. Boulder is a more liberal city, while Colorado Springs is a more conservative-inclined city. When a group from Boulder was told to discuss a question like, Should international law do more to combat global warming?, the group was likely to move toward an extreme. The converse was also likely with Colorado Springs' groups.

What explains these phenomena? There are many variables. The obvious one is whether a group is homogeneous in its ideology. Information also plays a key role. If a group of vegans is given a news article exposing that a popular fast food chain treats its animals inhumanely, or that red meat causes cancer, they will almost undoubtedly polarize after discussion, since the new information amplifies their already held convictions. Corroboration can also move individuals in extreme directions even if the group members begin a discussion unsure of their beliefs. In such a case, if each group member is equally uncertain about, for example, whether torture is wrong, but all members have the same information (for example, torture helped get Osama bin Laden), then after discussion the group is likely to polarize in favor of torture. Reputation can be a key catalyst as well: a group member who emits the appearance of knowledge can push others to extremes due to the said person is perceived as being correct; even if some of the other group members' opinions conflict with the person with the reputation, they will often yield to him or her. (A year ago I was playing Trivial Pursuit with my family and my team was posed with the question: Who was the leader of the Soviet Union when the Berlin Wall was constructed? "Stalin!", I shouted. "I just read a book on it!" To my embarrassment the answer was Nikita Khrushchev, but my team yielded to my conviction because they perceived me as being knowledgeable and having the correct answer.)

Similarly, reputation acts to influence individuals insofar as they are concerned about their reputations. (Contrast this with the idea of reputation above, where individuals yielded to others who they perceived has having good reputations.) Here's an example copied form the book, "Suppose that a group of doctors is deciding what steps to take to resusciate apparently doomed patients. Are individual doctors less likely, or more likely, to support heroic efforts than teams of doctors?" Individual doctors are less likely because their reputations are not in jeopardy when acting alone, out of the eyesight of other doctors. A team of doctors is more likely to support heroic efforts because each individual doctor will yield to the "rhetorical advantage", where the rhetorical advantage is to do whatever it takes to save a life. That is to say, an individual in a team of doctors does not want his reputation to be tainted by opposing the sanctity of human life.

Above are just a few examples of polarization. Sunstein's book is an excellent survey of when, how, and why polarization happens, as well as when, how, and why it often doesn't happen.

It is somewhat puzzling why this book should garner such favorable reviews. It presents a great deal of evidence, mainly based upon a range of experiments carried out by social psychologists 20 to 30 years ago. These demonstrate that groups do not lead members to moderate their beliefs and attitudes through group discussion. Rather, there is a tendency for people, following discussion, to move to positions that are more extreme than those which they held prior to participation in the group. But there appears to be little that is new or surprising in the material presented. The proneness of people to be led to extremity through group participation has been known for some time. We also have a lot of evidence about the conditions that may obviate this effect and prevent polarization.

It is attractive, perhaps, that commentators are able to understand why the creation of groups of like-minded people, created to make decisions, such as committees of government, or panels of federal court judges, can lead to extremity rather than moderation. It is interesting to see that there are social forces that can lead to extremism and we need not always assume some characteristic of the people, their personality or their pathology, leads to extremity. This is a service performed by this book. But it may be a message that now itself needs moderation.

There is evidence becoming available that suggests that the formation of groups of people who form groups with different compositions, among such differences being variations in the average extremity of the opinions held, can lead not to polarization but rather to moderation. These studies are not done with college students or with ideologically extreme individuals, as has been the case with the bulk of the evidence presented by Sunstein. They are carried out with a range of voters across the political spectrum, everyday people leading everyday lives.

So, we must be wary of the evidence. The message of the book is that like-mindedness can lead to polarization of belief. That, as something which makes us question fundamental beliefs about personality and about the power of groups, is important. But the book also perhaps is speaking to the same kind of audience; we read what we like and already believe and we are reinforced in our beliefs and are led to a greater degree of extremity. We also need to read and to be exposed to evidence that is contrary to what we think or what we want to believe. Challenge can lead to moderation. In these times of increasing extremity of opinions about matters of the causes and effects of climate change, of changes in health care policy, on decisions about troop commitments etc, information that can affect the character of debate that can moderate rather than polarize would be better.

This book is good, so far as what it does. At this time perhaps there is a case for doing something different.

Irish voters have just changed their minds. From a No to the Lisbon Treaty last year they have moved to a massive Yes. How did this happen? This book, though thoughtful and provocative, does not really suggest an answer this kind of question.

Much of what SUNSTEIN says is very interesting (albeit not that new, see SHERMER Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time or SUROWIECKI The Wisdom of Crowds): far from being fearless rational machines, humans are delicate psychological complexes very sensitive to social pressures - simple conformism quickly veers toward extremism. The group is the social unit within which this phenomenon occurs. The smaller the group - the faster the shift towards extremism. The opening up of the group by social and political means is SUNSTEIN's method of choice to combat extremism.

So what happened in Ireland? I'd venture that it was not enhanced deliberation that changed people's mind, but something more fundamental. People were confronted with the consequences of their intended actions. They knew that this time around they'd risk expulsion from the EU, should their assent fail to materialise. The consequences were hardly foreseeable, but ominous, and they felt the risk not worth taking.

Opinions come cheap. We can have many, often even extreme opinions. We can become radical in our views when inside a group. But in the end, what counts is not what we think, but what is done. And before acting we must confront the likely consequences of our actions. At which point we may quickly change our mind - individually or collectively. Extremism, in my view, is very much evidence of dissonance between opinion and consequences. Simply being in a group exacerbates the problem: there consequences diffuse and dissipate. Combating extremism might then be also or foremost a matter of reducing this dissonance by improving the feed-back and accountability mechanisms to the individual and the group (juries award horrific damages because the award does not come out of their pockets; murderers often kill because they expect to get away with it).

On how to do so SUNSTEIN is mostly silent. Worse, he does not even put it at the centre of the discussion, though it should be at least at par with better deliberative structures (SUNSTEIN mentions `consequentialism' at pg. 132, but it is just a deliberative tool).

A good point (though one that gets lost under the heading: "Good extremism") is that new ideas have a greater chance to emerge in small groups. Just as allopatry brings forth speciation, isolated groups can generate a variety of novel ideas, some good, and many bad. Once they stand, they must be subjected to general deliberation and eventual vetting. Minorities are a dynamic and disruptive element in society.

SUNSTEIN discusses the MILGRAM and Stanford experiments at length. I'm not sure that they tell us anything. They are akin to disabling a car's steering wheel and brakes in order to prove that the car is dangerous when in motion. In any psychological experiment reality is replaced by the artificial and very summary experimental framework. The participant is asked to adopt and adapt. Having been asked to forego his moral compass, why are we surprised that he has none?

This is an excellent short, punchy and important book. It contains some very useful ideas, both for personal use, and which will help us in business and political settings.

Its basic point is two fold. Firstly that birds of a feather flock together. Secondly, as they do this they tend to narrow their field of options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions.

This phenomenon which affects all of us up to a point, becomes dangerous quickly, particularly when we do not accept the discipline of wide reading or other exposure to many different people and ideas. One of the privileges of working as a doctor is that by default I meet people from most walks of life, and learn a lot about them, and about how to adapt my style to meet the needs of different patients. The medicine is the same- but my presentation of it alters according to who I am treating. My medical experience has led to me becoming more moderate over time, and to recognition that there are often many options to approach any one particular problem.

The opposite of meeting, learning and debating with many others is the in group, the phenomenon of looking for reinforcement of previous prejudices, rather than for new knowledge, or counter examples. The extreme of this in group thinking, and ignoring, or misinterpreting the rest of the world is seen in terrorism, and other single issue fanaticisms.

Sunstein has done us a great favour by summarising the cognitive work needed to be done to become a dogmatic fanatic or terrorist, and by showing us what we need to do to avoid this.

Some degree of associating with birds of a feather is useful (e.g. a learned society, a local football club) in terms of sharing experience and developing focused expertise. But we lose so much if we go too far down this specialisation process and develop a blind spot for the rest of the world.

Great minds think alike? Fools seldom differ? This book navigates the balance between these two opposites beautifully.

I turn on my television and computer each day now to get my news. I go to web pages and stations that reflect, I suspect, my beliefs. If I'm conservative, it's Fox. MSNBC for liberals. Is that a problem? We get the news that fits our beliefs. According to this book, its a big problem. It may make our decisions as a people far more divisive. Why? This books answers that question. Turns out that when people of a particular political bent sit down together and talk, they get more polarized. Liberals get more liberals, conservatives more conservative. They stop looking and listening to opinions that don't match their own. And, they see the other side in much more stereoptypic ways. All of this spells trouble for those of us who believe in rationale, thoughtful, and diverse discussions of issues. If you don't believe this is a problem, look at how the current health care debate is being hyjacked by people who are literally making things up.

This book does a masterful job of integrating massive bodies of social scientific literature that create a compelling argument that polarization is afoot and is being aided and abetted by people's natural tendencies to hang with people like themselves and avoid dissonant information.

Only two hesitations.

First, the complaints are much stronger than the solutions offered. I had hoped that the author of Nudge would have had some more creative solutions to this issue he raises.

Second, there remains the issue of whether this is really such a problem. I've spent lot of time in Europe where there have been, for many years, politically polarized news outlets. Yet London is still a politically very diverse debating society on issues. You might read The Times, another person might read the Independent, your colleague the Guardian, and the guy next door the Sun but all of you, nonetheless, seem to grasp the nuances of the issues being discusses. Same in France and Italy. So, is this much ado about nothing. Read the book and come up with your decision!