But this may not have come through in my piece today in Bloomberg View about Book Pricing and all the crazy prices, some of them quite low, charged for my new book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies.

What got cut out of the piece, for space reasons, was where I said that what book stores are selling is the taste and judgement of their staff. When you walk in a book store, you are paying for someone to select and put before your eyes good books that are worth considering. In the age of the Internet, that’s actually more valuable, because one can become lost in a sea of books. And if that book stores gives you a pleasant, well-lit environment, with maybe a cafe to have a cup of coffee, all the better. It makes paying more for the actual physical book worth it.

Buying and Selling always happens at a price, but who decides? That’s at the heart of the disputes between publishers and retailers in the book world, as well as the amazing unpredictability of pricing. I talk about it here in my latest piece for Bloomberg View.

I’m speaking to the urban planning group SPUR, which is headquartered in San Francisco, at 6:30 pm at their San Jose facility. Should be fun. You can see info about it here.

I’m speaking about my new book at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on Oct. 17, 2012, at noon. It’s free to anyone, and they even give you lunch! You can register here.

I had this oped in Bloomberg View this week. Check it out here.

David Brooks of The New York Times really captured something in today’s column that I was thinking about as well, which was of the sadness of Judge Sotomayor’s life and how it was similar to many of the more recent high achievers. No marriage, no children, little home life. I think this applies particularly strongly to high achieving women, but also to men as well. I’ve noticed more and more that both men and women now almost seem to have to make a choice: you can be a high achieving, high ambition person, or you can get married and have children. You no longer can do both. I’m overstating it to be sure, but I have married friends here in New York that are at the top of their profession, and being childless seems like a career decision with them. At some point, they had to choose. I think Brooks is onto something that we’ve purified our meritocracy so much that we’ve started to become specialized, like insects.

I went to the New Urbanism conference last weekend in Philly, which was rapprochement of sorts. For years I felt I had almost been actively urged not to come to these annual events, whereas this time I was invited as a speaker on one of the panels. I enjoyed being there. Despite all my criticisms of the movement, I felt mostly at home there, and ran into all sorts of people I knew.

I was on a panel with Inga Saffron of the Philadelphia Inquirer on managing the media. Inga, the architecture critic for the Inky, follows a long tradition within newspapers of writers migrating to specialties they at first seem to have no particular background for. Before architecture critic, Inga was a foreign correspondent and covered two quite dangerous wars in Chechnya and Bosnia. I suspect her experience in such areas grounds her in covering subjects like contemporary architecture that are high in passion but short in actual danger, except to people’s egos.

Inga is hardly alone in making such transitions. Frank Bruni, a classmate of mine at Columbia Journalism School, went from covering George Bush during his 2000 presidential race, to covering Italy as bureau chief, to the current Food Critic at The New York Times. Quite a journey. I envy his legs. Alessandra Stanley, the Times current television critic, used to be a Moscow bureau chief where she got to know Inga Saffron, I was told. Stephen Kinzer, author of Bitter Fruit and an acclaimed writer on Central America and the world, frequently writes about art for the Times. And so on.

In my own much smaller way, I’m an example of this phenomena. I went from wanting and sometimes being a foreign correspondent early in my career in places like Central America, to being mostly a local political and city hall reporter, to then writing a lot about development, before gradually focusing primarily on the squishier subjects of urban planning, design, architecture, culture, economics and everything else that goes into human development. It’s certainly a valid accusation that we generalists lack something in depth by having such an eclectic background, but we gain something as well. By getting a broader taste of the world, we may able to judge and weigh things with a greater dollop of truth per word. Let’s hope so.