Economics — Monarch of All Its Surveys

May 27, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1950s,, psychoanalysts ruled. Whatever the social issue, writers for high-brow journals could easily find at least a few psychoanalysts eager to assess the problem, its causes, and perhaps its solutions.. Seems hard to believe now. After all, aside from the occasional patient, they had little experience with juvenile delinquency or comic book readers or racial discrimination. Yet psychoanalysts could apply their theories and techniques to any area of human behavior. 

Today, the same can be said of economists.

The Niskanen Center, which is concerned mostly with public policy, recently posed three questions on crime to a panel of sixty-six academics they designate as experts. [UPDATE: Niskanen did not conduct this survey. They did publish it on their Website. See Greg Newburn's clarification in the comment below.] They were asked their level of agreement or disagreement.

1: Increasing police budgets will improve public safety.
2: Increasing social service budgets (e.g. housing, health, education) will improve public safety.
3: Increasing accountability for police misconduct will improve public safety.

The report, “Policing and public safety: What do the experts think?” is here. The panel of experts is dominated by economists, Forty-eight of the sixty-six have a Ph..D. in economics. The other degrees come from departments like public policy, criminology or criminal justice, government, and sociology.

The experts include no ethnographers or anthropologists and no cops.

Several of the experts added comments to their Likert-scale agreement or disagreement. Many of the comments say, it depends. That is, it depends on what really goes on. It depends on how the policy is actually put into practice on the ground

Would increasing police budgets matter? 

 “I think increased funds going to the right places could help, but blanket increases are unlikely to do so.” (Jillian Carr, Ph.D, Economics, Texas A&M)

Increasing social service budgets? 

“My hunch (based on existing research) is that we dramatically underinvest in such programs from a public safety perspective. But not all programs are effective, so we still have a lot of work to do to figure out exactly which programs should get more funding and how to scale them.” (Jennifer Doleac , Ph.D, Economics, Stanford)

It reminded me of an article by Robert Martinson that was influential back when I was in the crim biz. The title was “What Works?” (1974). It was a sort of meta-analysis of prison rehabilitation programs. Many people misread the article as saying that the answer was Nothing. Nothing works. But what Martinson actually found was that some programs did work, and others did not. The trouble was that nothing in the structure or method of a program predicted its success or failure.

To understand why programs worked or not, you had to get inside the program. You had to look at how the people involved actually did their jobs. In short, you needed an ethnographer watching and listening, not an economist running the regressions.

The sixty-six Niskanen experts are all really smart people — the universities where they got degrees and are currently employed are all top tier — and they know a lot. But I would guess that few of them, especially the economists, have a thorough street-level knowledge of cops, communities, or criminals.

A wise comment by Jens Ludwig (Ph.D, Economics) says, indirectly, the same thing.

“There are good conceptual reasons for thinking that improved accountability (if we can figure out how to do that) could improve community trust in police, which would have all sorts of public safety benefits. We don't have a lot of rigorous studies documenting that at this point in time but we do have some suggestive case studies.”

I wonder how many of the people who did those case studies were considered experts whose opinions were worthy of the Niskanen Center.

Gender and the C-word

May 26, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

The C-word is back in the news thanks to a retweet by Rep.Marjorie Taylor Greene.  Greene had likened vaccination and mask policies to the forced wearing of yellow stars by Jews under the Nazis. Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy had said that her comparison was wrong. A Greene supporter came to her defense on Twitter:

Look you moron, nobody supported Israel in their recent conflict with Hamas more than MTG,. Her analogy may not have been perfect but you seriously need to get a grip you feckless c**t. Pelosi is the villain here.

@AsimplePatriot was alluding to Samantha Bee’s use of “feckless cunt” three years ago to describe Ivanka Trump. At the time, I blogged about the different ways that cunt is used in the US and the UK. For Brits, cunt does not explode the conversation the way it does here. In the US, uttering (or tweeting) cunt changes the question from who is a moron to who used that word.

What’s different this time is that an American used it to characterize a man (Kevin McCarthy). As I pointed out in the earlier post, Brits have been calling men cunts for at least a few decades. As an example, I embedded a Monty Python sketch from the 1960s. It’s still funny. (The post is here.)

We Americans have imported some Britishisms. One-off is now common, and I see gobsmacked coming through customs. But I doubt that @AsimplePatriot’s tweet signals the start of a trend towards making cunt less taboo and less gender-specific.*

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* I remember a dorm-room discussion long ago, mostly Jewish guys in the room, where someone characterized a girl as a schmuck. “You should never call a girl a schmuck,” said another guy, and after a pause added, “Unless she’s a real schumck.”

The Lessons of Pre-K

May 12, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The curriculum of kindergarten is basically sitting still,” I would say in class when we were talking about the functions of schools. Or maybe I said, “elementary school.” The point was that we count on school not just to educate kids but to socialize them. Now a recent MIT study of Boston pre-K takes that idea a step further. A pre-K lottery program allowed them to compare kids who, through luck of the draw, got into pre-K and those who did not, On academic achievement as measured by standardized tests, pre-K had little or no effect  — not in elementary school, not in middle school, not in high school.

But the kids who lucked into pre-K were more likely to finish high school and go to college. They were also somewhat less likely to run into disciplinary problems in school. To stretch the meaning of the results, you could say that they were more attached to the conventional institutions and roads to success.

 

(Click on an image for a larger view. The graphic is from the researchers’ earlier NBER paper.)

Schools make no secret that their task is to socialize children, to get them to be good members of society. My report card at Stephen C. Foster school opened to show two sides, the left containing grades in academic subjects — arithmetic, penmanship, music, geography, etc. (Some of these names may give you an idea of how long ago I was in grade school.). The page on the right had many more lines, each of them a specific area of socialization  — the “plays well with other” sort of thing. The only one I remember was “Keeps fingers away from nose and mouth.” That’s right. Foster school was concerned with nose-picking.

A quick trip through Google Images assured me that schools continue this tradition, giving equal space to the academic and the social.

I assume that for pre-K, the academic/social balance is weighted even more heavily towards the social. The research on the academic effects of pre-K is mixed at best. Some studies show that pre-K kids somewhat outperform their later-starting peers, but the advantage fades as kids go farther in school. But if the results of the Boston study are not a one-off, when it comes to the instilling the lessons of what my junior high school report card called “citizenship,” the effects of an early start, while not huge, can be long-lasting

Personal Needs and Public Morality

May 6, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston
    

Victoria Eng updated the page [a GoFundMe for the victim] on Wednesday to say that her grandmother is recovering well after surgery.

“These Asian hate crimes need to stop," she wrote. "San Francisco is my home and my Grandma's home. We need to feel safe where we live and not in constant fear.”

Over the last sixty years, we have largely abandoned the language of moral imperatives for the language of psychological well-being. We don’t say what should or must happen or what people ought to do. Instead, we talk about what is needed.

I have noted this change before (here and here, for example). But I couldn’t pass up the above quote in yesterday’s NPR news story.  It so perfectly uses both the new and the old sense of need.

The second need — “We need to feel safe. . .” — would have been as unremarkable in the 1960s as it is today. It’s about needs, specifically the needs of Asians.

But “These Asian hate crimes need to stop” is about morality. It says what should or must happen. But we longer use words like should or must. We don’t tell people what they ought to do. “You ought to stop drinking so much.” That would be imposing an external morality, and morality is always about what’s good for others and for the society as a whole, not the individual. Instead we phrase it in terms of the person’s own needs; we tell them what is in their own interest and will benefit them.. “You need to stop drinking so much.”

This use of need has expanded to the point that we now talk about the needs of Asian hate crimes.

Of course, the meaning of the sentence is clear. It’s Asians or the society as a whole that needs for these hate crimes to stop. But because of the change in language, we now phrase it in a way that syntactically makes no sense.

Ron Carter, b. May 4, 1937

May 4, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ron Carter’s Downbeat Blindfold Test was the best I’ve ever read. In most of these, the musician tries to guess the identity of the performer,adds some evaluative comments or personal recollections, and then gives the track a rating of one to five stars. I don’t recall how accurate Carter was in identifying the musicians. But instead of focusing on who the musicians were, he told you what they were doing. Not the soloist so much as the rhythm section, the part of the performance that most people’s ears are not going to pick up.

It was the only Blindfold Test where you actually learned something about the music, and I told him as much when I happened to see him in Fairway one morning a few weeks later. (I think this was about fifteen years ago.)

In an interview posted yesterday, he does something similar. Carter was the bassist in Miles’s second great quintet, the group of the mid-sixties. The  rhythm section —  Carter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Wiliams — created something new in jazz, a sound very different from that of the late-1950s quintet with Paul Chambers, Red Garland, and Philly Joe Jones. They were kids then. Ron and Herbie were in their twenties, Tony Williams was barely twenty. Miles was nearly forty.

The question in the interview asked whether the rhythm section ever talked specifically — with one another or with Miles — about what they were doing. The answer is, not very much; they just listened to one another and learned.

But Carter’s anecdote goes beyond that generality to focus on a specific and non-intuitive note (B natural) that he played in Autumn Leaves.



It goes without saying that Carter is one of the greatest bass players of all time. At 84, he’s still going strong and eager to get back to work when the clubs and concert halls reopen.