Nostalgia, New York Style

May 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Times put up an online link where readers can list their own answers to “What Do You Miss Most About Old New York?”

The hook for the story was the announcement Thursday that New York may bring back double-decker buses. Today, the Times Metro section has an article with photos of the Automat and the 1964 World’s Fair and references to the Dodgers and boom boxes.

Nostalgia is apparently very popular, at least among Times readers. In the first 24 hours, the link has gotten over 400 responses. It’s not an unbiased sample, but if you’re looking for a nostalgia database, it’s a place to start.

There’s a lot of price nostalgia. Of course, the people who remember getting the Journal-American for a nickel and a theater ticket for $6.60 omit any mention of their annual income then and now. And as someone points out, in a few years, we’ll fondly remember the $5 cup of coffee.

Many of the items are about restaurants, bars, clubs, and stores that are no longer around. They’ve been replaced by other restaurants, bars, etc. that the next generation will wax nostalgic about. But as one Maury F implies in a wonderfully sarcastic post, some aspects of the current cityscape will never be a source of nostalgia.

Banks. I miss banks. Have you noticed there aren’t any more BANKS in Ol’ Gotham? Can’t find a one anywhere. And drugstores! Oh, how I miss seeing those Duane Reade’s and CVS’s and Walgreens. . . . And coffee, dammit! Where’s my double-latte? Can’t find me a decent cup of coffee nowheres no more. Oh, and chain stores — if all of the rest of the country has all them nice stores in all them nice malls, why can’t we??? . . .I miss the old days when New York wasn’t so unique.

Some people miss the subway token even though the Metrocard is far more convenient. On the other hand, Checker cabs (mentioned by at least 20 people) are a real loss. They really were more comfortable and easier to get in and out of.

The most contentious issue is urban disorder, and the flash point is Times Square, once seedy but now Disney-clean. One poster quotes Jimmy Breslin – “gimme the hookers!”– and another says, “Bring back the porn.” Other posters dismiss this sentiment. “Yeah, I really miss the prostitutes, squeequee shakedown artists, and crumbling tax base of “old New York”. How about some bankruptcy and racial violence while we’re at it?”

One poster, recognizing a tradeoff between sleaze and rent wants “just enough crime to drive housing costs down to an affordable level.” But someone else responds, “Living in fear of getting mugged/raped is NOT an acceptable tradeoff for low rents and cozy brick tenement buildings.”

Is there any good research on how real estate prices and crime are related? Do decreases in crime drive up prices in the same way that increases in crime drive down prices, and with similar lag times? Do different types of crime have different effects? (If I were still in the crim biz, I’d probably know more about these questions, but alas I’m not, and I don’t.)

Sociology on Trial

May 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jury duty. The man in charge in the central jurors’ room, a sixtyish man named Walter something-or-other, gave his announcements and instructions with a dry and delightful sense of humor that made the waiting bearable.

We filled out our “ballots” with name, address, occupation, and date of birth and took them up to the desk. When I handed mine in, Walter looked at it and asked, “What do you profess?”

“Sociology,” I said.

He paused only a second as if trying to remember something from long ago. “So we all suffer from . . . what? Anomie?”

“Right,” I said. We were both pleased.

Paris Dreams

May 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

French political culture differs from US political culture (see yesterday's post and posters). Other cultural differences also turn up dans les rues.

I wonder how long this Paris driver could keep on truckin' in the US before he got arrested (though not on kiddie porn charges, despite yesterday's efforts by Scalia, et. al. ; the ad guarantees that the model is 25 years old.)

Tip of the cap (lens cap, that is) to Misplaced in the Midwest.

"Unemployable Sociology Graduates"

May 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

From an article on Sarkozy in the Economist

Last summer Mr Sarkozy granted the universities autonomy from central state control. This has freed them to recruit the lecturers they want, at salaries they negotiate, and to set up private foundations—with tax breaks for donors—to complement public finance. The idea, says one government adviser, is to encourage a dozen of the most go-ahead universities, such as Toulouse l, to transform themselves into centres of excellence, even if the rest carry on churning out unemployable sociology graduates as before.

This from the issue of May 1. Forty years earlier in France, an unemployable sociology student, Daniel Cohn-Bendit was one of the leaders of a movement that nearly brought down the DeGaulle government.

In the US, the workers (“hard hats”) were beating up student demonstrators, and even today, despite an extraordinarily unpopular administration and an unpopular war, there is still resentment of “elitist” educated types. We find it hard to imagine students and workers uniting against the government, especially against an administration headed by a military hero. But that’s what happened in France in May of 1968.





































You can find photos here and here .

Trucking Ritual Among the Westbound

May 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

So there I was sitting in traffic near the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel this morning and thinking about – oh, I don’t know, the usual I guess: the Celtics’ loss last night, sex, classic articles that get anthologized in just about every intro sociology reader. That sort of thing. I glanced over at the truck next to me, and saw this.

Once out of the tunnel, I pulled alongside for another view.

If you look closely through the window, you can see Horace Miner in the driver’s seat.

What's In a Name Tag?

May 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The discussion over on Scatterplot about ASA meetings has a subthread about name tags – what to put on them (insitutional affiliation? interests?) and whether to have them at all.



My first ASA experience with name tags is exactly the same lesson in gender studies that Dave Pike mentions in his Scatterplot comment: for the first time in my life, I understood what it felt like to have people constantly looking at my chest when they first met me.*

Maybe we should wear hats – like reporters in the 1940s movies – with our names just above the brim.


*This adds another level of significance to the SNL spoof of Annette that I mentioned a couple of posts back.

I, You, We

May 14, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of the things that bothers me about Hillary Clinton is that I don’t think she really believes in democracy. Or rather, she believes in democracy the same way that the people in the Cheney-Bush administration believe in democracy. It’s an O.K. way to elect a president but an inconvenient way to run a government.

Democracy, or their version of it, is best summed up as “electing our king.”* They see their election as a mandate to rule as they see fit. And because they are the ones who know best, sharing power and information with others would just be inefficient. What they want, and what they believe is necessary, is the concentration of power.

Why, I wonder, do I think that Hillary doesn’t really trust others and that her approach to government would be a continuation of the current administration’s arrogation of power and information? I have little evidence beyond the way she tried to run the health-care policy reform initiative in the early days of the Clinton White House. Other evidence may exist; I’m just not enough of a political junkie to have collected it.

More to the point, why do I think that Obama would be substantially different? Where did I get these impressions?

I’m not sure. But brands consultant Claude Singer has an answer: pronouns.

The key to understanding this primary struggle and the ultimate victory of Obama over Clinton lies in the pronouns. Hillary is about I and you. I will do this for you. . . . You are in trouble and I will help you. I will fight on and on… for you. I – it’s very much about what I am, have been, will do – am here for you. . . . Hillary is pleading for us to help her… and in return Hillary promises that she will help you.

Obama is all about We.

Claude hedges his bets. “I’m not speaking of the words themselves, not literally.”

But what if we did take the idea literally, word for word, pronoun for pronoun?

I did a quick-and-dirty with the texts of speeches I could find easily on the Internet. These included the speeches of both candidates after SuperTuesday, Clinton’s speech after the West Virginia primary last night, and Obama’s speech on race in response to the Rev. Wright flap. I counted all the instances of I, We, and You (including contracted forms like I’ll and You’ve but excluding the thank yous and you knows). I divided by the total word count of each speech to get a rate per 1,000 words. Here are the results.


We usually has the highest frequency for both candidates – Clinton’s West Virginia speech is probably an exception, but worth noting nevertheless. Clearly, the We/I and We/You ratios are higher for Obama – even in the Race speech, where he had to discuss his own experiences with race, religion, and Wright.

I do believe that the candidates’ styles of speaking, including their choice of pronouns, reveal a difference in their styles of thinking and that while Clinton prefers the concentration of power, Obama looks more favorably on the diffusion of power. Can this decentralizing tendency survive the structural pressures of the White House? I hope we find out.

*I was sure that this was the title of a book some years back, but Google and Amazon though I might, I cannot find it.

The Old College Try

May 9, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rejection is tough.

About a month ago, high school seniors heard from the colleges they’d applied to. There were a lot more rejections than acceptances. That’s just the math. This year’s seniors are the product of a birth-rate peak in 1990, and not only were there more kids, but each kid was sending out more applications – not to three or five schools but to a dozen. The numbers are especially daunting at the elite schools. Harvard and Yale had more than ten applicants for every place.

How do you deal with that kind of rejection? At my son’s school (one of New York’s selective public schools), they have a Wall of Rejection – a wall in the main lobby where kids tape their rejection letters.

Apparently, other schools do something similar. At Newton South in Massachusetts, it’s called the Wall of Shame. Bad choice of names. In fact, it should be the Wall of No Shame. When you see all those letters, you come to understand that there’s no shame in being rejected. Disappointment, yes, but not shame. It’s one thing to know in some abstract way that others have been rejected. But seeing the evidence of specific cases –“Omigod, Eric got rejected??” – provides more real comfort. Those rejection letters of the standout students make your own seem less stigmatizing.

One student even created a customized Harvard rejection letter for himself.*

He’s kidding, of course, about his own qualifications.

On the downside, only a day or two after the Wall or Rejection went up, some kids started wearing t-shirts or sweatshirts from the colleges where they had been accepted and would be going in the fall.



*The print in this picture may be too small to read, though if you click on the image, you may be able to get a larger version. The letter says in part,

What were you thinking? There is no way I would EVER offer you admission to the class of 2012. Over twenty-seven thousand students, a record number, applied to the entering class. A great majority of the applicants could have been successful here academically, and most candidates presented strong personal and extracurricular credentials as well. You, however, had no business applying here. Your grades are terrible, your scores were awful, and your extracurriculars were non-existent.

Harvard is out of your league, kiddo. Get over it.

And under the signature

P.S. If you appeal this decision, apply for a transfer, or apply for grad school here, I will hunt you down.