Book 29: If You Can Read This

Book 29: If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, by Jack Bowen

I need to learn to read book synopses more closely. I think I expected this one to be more like the psychology of people who apply bumper stickers or something. Instead, it was more along the lines of the Buffy and Philosophy book I read a while back.

The author takes various bumper stickers, like the formerly popular "Baby on Board!" and analyzes them according to various philosophical principles. In this case, Bowen comments that drivers are no more likely to NOT get into an accident with a car displaying this particular sticker than they are any other vehicle. He goes on to refer to the "action bias" - a person's inclination to believe that doing something is better than doing nothing, even if the "something" that they do makes things worse than the situation would have been had they done nothing.

By the end I found it difficult to pay attention to the full extent of the author's philosophizing about each sticker. I think changing the layout of the book would have been beneficial - rather than finish the section I was on, I felt myself inclined to skip forward to the next sticker as soon as I saw it.