Montclair SocioBlog

Name It and Frame It

2012-02-01T05:47:00.000-05:00

February 1, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It can take a while to find the right word. But a mot juste may be crucial for framing a political issue. If you like the idea of men being able to marry men, and women women, what should you call the new laws that would allow that?

The trouble with “gay marriage” and even “same-sex marriage” is that these terms suggest – especially to conservatives – some kind of special treatment for the minority. It’s as though gays are getting a marriage law just for them.

At last, the gay marriage forces seem to have come up with a term that invokes not special treatment but a widely-held American value that’s for everyone – equality. A bill in New Jersey has been in the news this week, mostly because Gov. Christie says he will veto it. The bill is a “marriage equality” law.

The governor is in a bit of a squeeze. As a Republican with ambitions beyond New Jersey’s borders, he can’t very well be for gay marriage. But if his opponents can frame the matter their way, he now has to come out against equality. Which is why the governor continues to refer to the issue as “same-sex marriage.”*

It’s like “abortion rights” or even “women’s rights.” A phrase like that might rally women to your cause, but if you want broader support, you need a flag that every American can salute. I’m not familiar with the history of abortion rights so I don’t know how it happened, but those who want to keep abortion legal have managed to frame the issue as one of freedom to choose. They have been so successful that the media routinely refer to their side as “pro-choice.” To oppose them is to oppose both freedom and individual choice, principles which occupy a high place in the pantheon of American values.

It’s not clear that the “marriage equality” movement has been similarly successful, at least not yet. I did a quick Lexis-Nexis search sampling the last week of the months January and July going back to 2007. I looked for three terms

Same-sex marriage
Gay marriage
Marriage equality

The general trend for all three is upwards as more legislatures consider bills, with big jumps when a vote becomes big news – that blip in July 2011 is the New York State vote. But the graph can’t quite show how “marriage equality” has risen from obscurity. That first data point, July 2007, is a 4. Four mentions of “marriage equality” while the other terms had 25 and 50 times that many. As of last week, “gay” and “same sex” still outnumber “equality,” but the score is not nearly so lopsided.

Here is a graph of the ratio of “equality” to each of the other two terms. From nearly 1 : 20 (one “marriage equality” for every 20 “gay marriages”) the ratio has increased to 1 : 3 and even higher when the discussion gets active.

If the movement is successful, that upward trend should continue. When you hear Fox News referring to “marriage equality laws,” you’ll know it’s game over.
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* Christie is usually politically adept, but he’s stumbling on this one. He referred to a gay legislator as “numb nuts” (literally, that might not necessarily a liability for a politician caught in a squeeze). Christie also said that he’s vetoing the bill so that the matter can be put on the ballot as a referendum – you know, like what should have happened with civil rights in the South.

I think people would have been happy to have a referendum on civil rights rather than fighting and dying in the streets in the South.

Several critics, including Numb Nuts, responded that, yes, Southern whites would have been happy to have civil rights left up to the majority. African Americans not so much. (If you’re looking for an illustration of Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority,” the post-Reconstruction South might be a good place to start.) The analogy is obvious – race : 1962 :: sexual orientation : 2012 – even if it was not the message the governor intended.

Politicans and Actors, II

2012-01-28T12:45:00.000-05:00

January 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A post (here) a couple of days ago showed the fictional Larry Garfied, played by Danny DeVito, justifying Mitt Romney’s capitalism, and doing a better job of it than does Romney himself.

Here’s another politician, Anthony Albanese, an Australian cabinet minister, delivering a politically charged speech. Like Romney, he’s not all that bad. But Michael Douglas, seventeen years ealier, shows him how Aaron Sorkin’s lines should be delivered.

(For more information, see this Language Log post, which is where I found the story.)

Spinning 2.8%

2012-01-28T12:28:00.000-05:00

January 28, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday’s news was that GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2011 was 2.8%. The Houston Chronicle played up the political import.

Is 2.8% GDP growth good news?
Texas Democrats say it is, Republicans say it’s a fluke

Good news about the economy is good news for the incumbents – Obama and the Democrats. Bad economic news is good for the Republicans. You would expect the liberal media elite to crow while the few brave conservative media stalwarts curbed their enthusiasm. So Fox News, predictably, said that the 2.8% was “modest.”

But that liberal bastion The New York Times gave the news a mixed review. Recession fears were fading, but the 2.8% was “not enough to comfort the Fed.”

But the Wall Street Journal led by accentuating the positive.

Steam indeed.

Meanwhile, at NPR, so often accused of “liberal bias,” 2.8% was Friday’s “Planet Money” indicator, and here’s what their correspondent Zoe Chace had to say about it.

I’m going to start by telling you what 2.8 is not. It is not a recession. But that’s pretty much the only good thing you can say about 2.8.

Why aren’t these media spinning the story the way they’re supposed to?

(A post of two years ago (here) tried to show how political purposes shaped views of whether 3%, is a lot or a little.)

Paris - New York (bis)

2012-01-26T07:40:00.001-05:00

January 26, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“How do you say hipster in French?” I asked yesterday. Now I know.

Much thanks le formidable Baptiste Coulmont (my main man / my name man), who steered me to the source, graphics designer Vahram Muratayn. Here is the counterpart to yesterday’s map – French quartiers mapped onto New York geography.

Both are from Muratayn’s book Paris Versus New York – a Tally of Two Cities (more info and posters here). You can also get several of these graphics as posters. Like this

An exhibit will be opening soon (Feb. 2) at the Shop at the Standard in Greenwich Village (St. Germain-des-Pres).

Urban Ecology, Paris-New York edition

2012-01-25T11:00:00.000-05:00

January 25, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was the sociologists in Chicago, not Paris or New York, who gave us the notion of “natural areas” in cities. Park and Burgess had a general model of ecological zones – the concentric circles radiating from the city center. Within these circles there might be more specialized niches – cultural enclaves whose distribution isn’t quite so predictable or consistent.

Here are the niches of New York mapped onto the map of Paris. The idea of the map is to point out the cultural similarities – Greenwich Village is like St. Germain, Williamsburg is like Buttes Chaumont (how do you say hipster in French?).

Geographically, there are some big differences. In the cultural geography of Paris, Morningside Heights is far from Columbia University, and Astoria is next to Dumbo. Not on the real NYC map.

But it’s interesting how often adjoining areas in the real NYC are still close together when mapped culturally onto Paris.

(This jpeg is the version I copied (thanks to a tip from the the redoubtable Polly-Vous Français) from the FB page of Richard Thierry, where it has gotten a ton of comments. My apologies for the small print that becomes illegible when you enlarge the image. I couldn’t find a better version.)

UPDATE: For more on this map, see the next day's post (here)

Shareholders vs. Stakeholders

2012-01-24T11:48:00.000-05:00

January 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Mitt Romney’s capitalism has come under attack – from fellow Republicans, of all people. They’re pummeling him for his work at Bain Capital, his private equity firm. “Private equity” became the term of choice when “leveraged buyout” acquired a connotation of nastiness, probably because many LBOs were in fact nasty affairs (“hostile” takeovers).

Romney is tall and good-looking with a full head of hair. He speaks with no noticeable regional accent. Danny DeVito is a photo negative of all that. But as Lawrence Garfield,* a.k.a. Larry the Liquidator in “Other People’s Money” DeVito does a much better job in making the case for what Mitt did at Bain Capital.** (The original title for this post was “Defending Private Equity – the Short Version.”)

Bain sometimes made money by bankrupting the companies it took over. That’s creative destruction for you – first the destruction, then creation. As Larry the Liquidator puts it***:

You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let's have the intelligence, let's have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future. . .
Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you'll get lucky and it'll be used productively. And if it is, you'll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves.

Romney’s critics talk about the people put out of work, the towns and communities eviscerated. That’s where Garfield/Romney are on shakier ground.

“Ah, but we can't,” goes the prayer. “We can't because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?” I got two words for that - “Who cares?”

Larry the Liquidator is raising the issue of shareholders vs. stakeholders. Stakeholders are all those people who are affected by a corporation. To attract corporations, local governments sometimes offer goodies like tax breaks, regulation breaks, and even bagfuls of cash. The localities defend these deals by saying that they will be good for the whole town, particularly for those who become employees or who sell goods and services to the corporation. These people and the town generally will be stakeholders. They all have a stake in the success of the corporation.

Corporations too often talk the stakeholder talk. But when times get tough, they talk the shareholder talk – the talk that Larry does so well. And they walk the shareholder walk. They walk out of town with the money from the sale of the company’s assets.

All this has implications for issues of trust, implications much too broad and deep for a simple blog post. See this 1988 article by Andrei Schleifer and Larry Summers, “Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers.”

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* Romney is a Mormon. Larry Garfield is of no specified religion, though we can assume he is not a Mormon. In the original play, he was Larry Garfinkle. For Hollywood purposes he became Garfield, just as did actor John Garfinkle.

** Conservapedia, as I’m sure Drek knows, rated “Other People’s Money” as one of the twenty greatest conservative movies.

*** For a transcript of Larry’s speech go here. The original stage play is by Jerry Sterner, the screenplay by Alvin (Three Spidermans) Sargent. I don’t know how much credit each gets for this speech.

Big hat tip to Ezra Klein for the material here.

The Declining Significance of “Class”

2012-01-23T06:02:00.000-05:00

January 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about class. That was the title I wanted to use, but it was too long, and besides, there are already too many of these Raymond Carver variants.

Class seems to have disappeared from public discourse, except for the Republicans’ insistence that to mention inequality at all is to engage in “class warfare.”* The only class we hear about, whether from politicians or the media, is the middle class. Here, for example, are the results of a Lexis-Nexis search of news transcripts in the previous month.

On TV news, the upper and lower class do not exist.

So how do we talk about those at the top and bottom of society? The discussion of inequality is now all about income. While “lower class” and “upper class” had only three and four mentions, respectively, in this same period, income terms (high, upper, low, lower) numbered over 300.

For some historical perspective, I looked at Google Ngrams for the frequency of class terms in books.

The gap between middle and working is not so large as in the transcripts graph. But here too, the lower and upper class have been barely worthy of notice. As for the historical pattern, class talk rises from the mid-1950s to about 1971. If, as the Republicans claim, thinking about social class is a indicator of radicalism, maybe the 1960s were indeed a radical moment in US history.

But after 1971, class discourses declines. Class references in 2008 were only about half what they were 37 years earlier.

Ngrams also shows the replacing of class talk with income talk, especially when we speak (or write) of those at the bottom.

The pattern for upper class is similar – a large decline in class talk, a much smaller decrease in income talk – though class references still outnumber income references.

From the media, you get the impression that except for a handful of people at the top and the bottom, there really is only one class in America – the middle class – and that the working class has faded into history. Yet the GSS subjective social class item (“Which class would you say you belong in?”) gets the same results as it did in 1972: a roughly equal split between “middle” and “working” that accounts for 9 out of 10 Americans.

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*This strategy seems to have worked recently for Newt Gingrich. When asked about his “open marriage” idea (Newt prides himself on his being a man of big ideas), he said that to ask the question was despicable. His multiple adulteries, and his request that his wife bestow her blessings on same was, I guess, just one of those things. But to point them out was appalling.

He added that questions like that made it “harder to attract decent people to run for public office. “ Apparently so .

Put a Ring on It?

2012-01-19T19:28:00.003-05:00

January 19, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Get married? Or just live together?

Lisa Wade’s “Why I Am Not Married” post was one of the most popular Sociological Images entries of 2011. It elicited over 100 comments – high even for SocImages.

Lisa included a defense of her partner’s and her decision not to seek the state’s approval of their relationship. The statement was personal (and courageous). But the only systematic research cited was, I think, the Pew report on the decline in marriage in the US.

Clearly, fewer couples are putting a ring on it. Since 1960, the percent married has declined from 72% to just above half. During this same period, the percentage of couples living together increased by a factor of ten. Many of those couples eventually marry, and many break up. Only about 10% remain living together unmarried for more than five years. (See the Annual Review article here.)

As you can imagine, there is much hand-wringing in certain quarters over the decline in marriage. And indeed, some research supports the idea that marriage is the way to go – that married couples are healthier, wealthier, happier, less likely to break up, and just generally better. (For an example of the pro-marriage view – “Why Marriage Is Better than Cohabitation” – go here and probably lots of other places). However, most of these comparison studies are cross-sectional. They compare the married and the cohabiting at a single point in time, so it’s hard to know what is causing what. If we find that marrieds are happier, for example, we still don’t know whether it’s because marriage causes happiness or because happy people are more likely to marry.

Determining cause and effect requires longitudinal analysis – following couples over time. A new study by Kelly Musick, to be published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family, did just that, looking at data from the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH). She tracked data on marrying and cohabiting couples over six years. Here’s her conclusion as reportd in a National Council on Family Relations press release (they publish the journal).

We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains – likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans – cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem. For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy, and personal growth.

Civil Rights and American Conservatism

2012-01-17T14:10:00.003-05:00

January 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

With all the tributes to Martin Luther King, it might be difficult to remember that in his lifetime, Americans were not always so aligned with Dr. King and the goals he worked for.
In August, Gallup (here) published some of their polling from the 1960s. The contrast with opinions today, when only 4% are unfavorable, is remarkable.

(Note: these results include all races. The data for whites only would surely show a higher percent unfavorable and a lower percent favorable.)

Except for 1966, the total favorable and unfavorable are fairly close. (The change in 1966 is a result of King’s opposition to the Vietnam war. He was right about that too.) But of those with strong opinions, the “highly unfavorables” always outnumber the “highly favorables.”

The unfavorables weren’t just those rabid Southern whites so familiar from the historical news footage. The same ideas could be found among seemingly temperate, sophisticated, and intellectual conservatives. Affable Ronald Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1957, William F. Buckley, Jr. supported the suppression of black votes in the South

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. (The full article is excerpted by Brad DeLong here.)

That was before the rise of the Civil Rights movement. Six years later, when Dr. King had come to prominence, a black church in Birmingham was firebombed. Four young girls died. Here is how Buckley’s National Review responded.

The fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur – of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. Some circumstantial evidence lends a hint of plausibility to that notion, especially the ten-minute fuse (surely a white man walking away form the church basement ten minutes earlier would have been noticed?). And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice.

The suggestion that the firebombing was committed by “a communist or a crazed Negro” is a fantasy of pure desperation and wish-fulfillment. Note also NR’s concern for “the cause of white people.” As for the church bombing, the beatings, the tortures, the murders, and other acts of terrorism (“convulsions” as the NR calls them), committed against blacks and civil rights workers, just blame it all on the Supreme Court.

All this would be laughable if the events were not of such grave importance and if the commentary were from some obscure, racist corner. But National Review, then as now, was the voice of intellectual conservatism.

Eugene Volokh, in an appreciation of Buckley (here), notes that it wasn’t until the late 1960s, after the passage of the major civil rights laws and probably after the King and RFK assassinations, that Buckley and NR finally gave up defending segregation. Volokh also says,

Buckley tried very hard to create a genial and friendly image for conservatism as opposed to one that projected anger, intolerance, and rage.

Michael Harrington put it somewhat differently:

William Buckley is an urbane front man for some of the most vicious emotions in this country.

Governing and Creative Destruction

2012-01-12T11:22:00.000-05:00

January 12, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mitt Romney’s work at Bain was basically “creative destruction” – capitalism, rational and ruthless, making money by reforming or trashing businesses.* No Bain, no gain. Romney emphasizes the creative part; his critics emphasize the destruction. But is any of this relevant to the Presidency?

Nearly a year ago, I expressed my skepticism (here) about business executives’ claims that their business skills would transfer to their government work. I contrasted these claims with this more realistic self-assessment by a former pimp, who, in an interview with Sudhir Vankatesh, was asked how his skills in that job might transfer to legitimate work.

You learn one thing [as a pimp]: For a good blow job, a man will do just about anything. What can I do with that knowledge? I have no idea.

Will Wilkinson at The Economist blog asks the skills-transfer question about Romney.

Even if Mr Romney's firm did in the end create more jobs than it killed by increasing the allocative efficiency of the market, what does this have to do with the tasks facing a president?

Wilkinson’s answer is Yes. He quotes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry** to the effect that what a president does “is also very similar to what a private equity investor does in a buyout: analyze the business, decide on a strategy and hire, retain (and fire) managers.”

This seems a bit of a stretch. Look at Obama’s difficulties in putting his policies (analyses and strategies) into effect. Even in his hiring of managers (i.e., making appointments), Congress has thwarted him.

George W. Bush ran for president touting his own business credentials and, once in office, styled himself “the CEO president.” Unlike Obama today, Bush had the benefit of a co-operative Congress. But the outcomes of the CEO presidency don’t seem to have been so wonderful. The last president before Bush to have been successful in business was the wealthy peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.

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*Those corporations, presumably, were people too, my friend. But capitalist efficiency and profits required that friends be fired and businesses bankrupted, while Bain made out like bandits.

** Gobry is not exactly Romney’s biggest fan – “a fundamentally dishonest liar with obvious contempt for his fellow citizens.”

UPDATE Jan. 13. Paul Krugman in today’s Times (here) draws a conclusion similar to mine though for a different reason: business strategies that are good for company profits are far different from economic policies that will be good for a country. :

Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.

Krugman also skips over Bush and Carter as businessman-presidents.

the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover.

Vacations

2012-01-11T20:28:00.000-05:00

January 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of these signs is what I typically see in New York. The other is what I saw in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where I’m spending a brief vacation (and not spending much time on the Internet).

The Mexican sign is the one on the right.

Cabo seems to exist only for the sake of American tourists. When I travel, I usually like to to get a sense of how life is lived in another country. That’s not what you get in Cabo. All livelihoods here are related to the tourist trade – the restaurants and gift shops, the time share complexes, the pharmacias selling Viagra and Cipro. It feels like being in some amalgam of a theme park and a colonial enclave.

See What Turns Up in an Ad for Glue

2012-01-06T09:50:00.000-05:00

January 6, 2012

Posted by Jay Livingston

This is a wonderful glue commercial, and it dates back 20 years. But I doubt that you will ever see it on ar anything similar on American television. It runs 1:20, and ads here are only thirty seconds.

(HT: S.A Livingston)

Myths That Move Us (and That Bus)

2012-01-03T05:21:00.000-05:00

January 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Supportive Community is one of America’s most cherished myths. By “myth,” I don’t mean that Community is some Gorgon or unicorn, a beast with no existence in reality. Observers of the US going back to de Tocqueville have been impressed by our community spirit.

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations . . . . The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. (DIA, II, 5)

The supportive community is a myth in the sense that it represents an ideal – it is a story that we love to tell ourselves about ourselves. When the story is true, so much the better.

Last week, David Brooks devoted his column to such a story. A woman from a small town in Louisiana was diagnosed with cancer, and “the entire town rallied around her,” with fund-raising cookouts and concerts to pay for her medical care. It’s all very touching and genuine, and Brooks uses it as an appeal to “communitarian conservatism.”

A much better known version of the myth is the television show “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.” Each week brings us a needy but deserving family, usually in a suburb or small town, almost never a city. Often, the family has been stricken by death, disease, or disability, but not despair. Always their house, despite their best efforts, is a shambles. The TV team comes in, sends the family on vacation (usually to Disney World – it’s an ABC show), and begins work on the centerpiece of its largesse, a new home.

It’s the modern counterpart of the 1950s “Queen For a Day,” but with two important differences. First, the sad story is always a family, not an individual. And second, the story always involves the community. Neighbors, co-workers, and others tell the camera what wonderful people the family are and how much they’ve given to the community. During the construction of the new house hundreds of people – a sort of town team wearing identical t-shirts and hard hats – turn up to help.

The show’s signature moment comes when the family is brought back from vacation. With the hundreds of neighbors (we assume that they are neighbors and not ringers brought in by ABC) in their matching t-shirts and hard hats, the family stands opposite the new house, but their view is blocked by a large bus. “Move that bus!” everyone chants.

The bus moves, the family runs to the house and goes through it room by room gasping “Oh my God.”

The stories David Brooks and ABC tell are heart-warming indeed. They show us at our best. They are our myth. But there are other stories.

On Sunday, “This American Life” reran a story about a woman who believed the myth. She has lived in the same town, on the same block, for forty years, but she is approaching seventy, and she turned to the community seeking help in caring for her autistic son, now 39, after she has died or become unable to look out for him. The short answer is that nobody volunteered, But take two minutes and listen to the entire excerpt, especially if you’re not familiar with “Extreme Makeover Home Edition.”

The point is that myth is not a substitute for policy. Not everybody who gets cancer is beloved by others in their town.* Not every needy family, not even every virtuous and deserving needy family, is beloved by ABC – and besides, the show has been cancelled. These stories are one-offs, and we do ourselves a disservice to think that the myth represents workable solutions to our large-scale problems – the millions of people without health care or affordable housing or jobs.**

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* To quote my own tweet, only in America do we need fund-raisers for people who become ill.

** Wrong thinking is a frequent theme on “This American Life.” (See this earlier SocioBlog post for another example.) A few years ago, NPR began a series called “This I Believe,” short essays by hundreds of different people stating their “core values.” (The archive now has over 100,000 such essays.) That prompted “This American Life” to run an episode called “This I Used to Believe.”

Here's host Ira Glass in an interview.

But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong. In fact, we've talked as a staff about how the crypto-theme of every one of our shows is: “I thought it would work out this way, but then it worked out that way.”

Detective Can

2011-12-31T11:22:00.000-05:00

December 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The NYPD doesn’t record all the crimes that victims report. That’s the shocking news on the front page of this morning’s Times (here).

A bit of history. In 1950, the number of burglaries in New York jumped by ~~1400%~~ 1300%. The entire increase was attributable to one man, and he wasn’t a burglar. He was the chief of police. We’re not talking here about actual burglaries, of course, just burglaries recorded by the police.

Prior to 1949, the policy on most reported burglaries was “canning.” The victim would report the crime, the police would listen, and then “refer the case to Lieutenant Can.” For reasons I cannot remember, the chief of police issued an order ending, or greatly reducing, that policy. As a result, the next year, New York had ~~fifteen~~ fourteen times as many burglaries. (Something similar happened with robberies in Chicago in the 1980s thanks to pressure form the FBI, which gathers statistics for the Uniform Crime Reports.)

What if a similar directive were issued today? The official numbers will rise, but everyone will know that this reflects a change in policy, not a change in safety. The trouble is that in the long run, there’s a sort of law of thermodynamics entropy eroding full reporting. Police reap no rewards for reporting more crime. Precincts or cities that report more crime may feel the wrath of the brass, the media, or the citizens. Rewards flow to areas with less crime, and NYPD chiefs will compare precinct with precinct, and they will compare this month with last month. Under these conditions, precinct commanders feel pressure to have lower crime numbers, and if the criminals and victims won’t cooperate in that effort, theres always Detective Can or his current equivalent.

Honesty and accuracy are nice in principle, but Compstat is what matters.

Technology – Old and New

2011-12-31T06:02:00.000-05:00

December 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Ddulite is the opposite of a Luddite. According to Mark Palko, who coined the term recently, a Ddulite is someone with a “preference for higher tech solutions even in cases where lower tech alternatives have greater and more appropriate functionality.”

Andrew Gelman can see the Ddulite logic though he himself doesn’t even have a cellphone.

It can make sense to switch early (before the new technology actually performs better than the old) to get the benefits of being familiar with the new technology once it does take off.

David Pogue, who writes the tech column for the Times, is probably a Ddulite. He gives one of his year-end Pogie awards to a projector, but not because it projects well – all projectors project – but for this beauty part:

The Pogie award-winning feature here, though, is a customizable start-up screen. You can add . . . an “if found, please call” message . . . . When the projector turns on, this start-up message is the first thing that appears.

Frankly, an “If found, please call” start-up message should be available on every cellphone, music player, tablet, laptop and remote control.

For years now, I have installed my own “If Found” technology on my cellphone, my MP3 player, my camera, and my laptop. Admittedly, it’s old technology, but it works remarkably well.

I rarely send anything via snail mail. But thanks to various charities (especially Amnesty International for some reason), I have hundreds of these address labels. I finally found a use for four of them.

I doubt that I’m in line for a Pogie

A Teachable Moment

2011-12-29T08:22:00.000-05:00

December 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)

This ad illustrates some sociological idea, something I could use in class. I’m just not sure what it is. (You may have already seen it. It’s been around on the Internet for a few months.)

Yes, it’s a beer commercial, not a documentary, not “reality.” But the couples are real and unscripted – like the victims in a “Candid Camera” bit (or the subjects in some social psychology experiments). Real and unscripted too is our reaction as viewers. I don’t know about you, but after the ad was over, I realized that I had shared something of the couples’ anxiety at being different and hence excluded. The bikers are neutral, maybe they are even silently hostile, so when they suddenly became accepting, my sense of relief was palpable. I laughed out loud.

So sociological point one is that we are social animals. Excluded we feel fear, accepted and included we feel comfort. Point two is that laughter is social. Here (and in many other situations) it’s a kind of tension-meter. There ad had no joke that I was laughing at. It was just a release from tension. No tension, no laughter.

The ad also illustrates “definition of the situation.” The rigged set-up shatters the couples’ standard definition of going to the movies. They are anxious not just because they are different but because they nave no workable definition and therefore no clear sense of what to do.

Finally, the ad raises the issue of stereotypes. Stereotypes may actually have some general statistical accuracy. The trouble is that the stereotype converts a statistical tendency to absolute certainty. We react as though we expect all members of the stereotype to be that way all the time or most of the time. Is it reasonable when you see 148 bikers to be fearful even to the point of leaving (I think some of the couples didn’t take the available seats)? You don’t need to have read Hunter S. Thompson to know there is some truth in the image of bikers as above the mean on violence. But in a theater where you find them quietly awaiting the movie?

What other sociological ideas does the ad suggest?

If You’re Going to Use Anecdotal Data, At Least Choose the Right Anecdotes

2011-12-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

December 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

For instance isn’t proof. So goes the old saying (Yiddish? Navaho? Confucian?).

Every semester in every course, I tell students that although anecdotal data can be useful for illustrating a general truth, a few selected cases don’t prove anything. So the argumentum ex anecdotum (pardon my made-up Latin) bothers me, especially when it comes from a social scientist.

Here’s a letter in today’s Times.

Ian Ayres and Aaron S. Edlin write, “It would be bad for our democracy if 1 percenters started making 40 or 50 times as much as the median American.”

Are Bill and Melinda Gates a great threat to democracy? Jeff Bezos? Oprah Winfrey? Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg? I fail to see how those who have amassed great fortunes in America threaten American democracy.

They do not plot coups or finance fascist militias. They do, however, give lots of money to wonderful charitable and educational organizations.

I think much of the animus toward the enormous success of such people is rooted in jealousy. “It’s not right that some people should make so much more money than I do” is the spiteful feeling behind much of the opposition to the 1 percenters.

Russ Nieli
Princeton, N.J., Dec. 20, 2011
The writer is a lecturer in the politics department at Princeton.

Not only does Princeton Lecturer Nieli rely solely on anecdotal data, but at least two of the four people he mentions clearly illustrate the point he is denying - that with great wealth comes the potential for great political power. Does anyone think that Michael Bloomberg, whatever his skills in politics, would have become mayor if his income were that of a lecturer at Princeton? If money really makes no difference in politics, if we all had equal power based only on our one vote per person, why do politicians spend so much time raising so much money?

Or take the recent legislation in California to apply the state sales tax to Internet sales. It was pretty clear that one citizen of the state of Washington, Jeff Bezos, had vastly more influence on the legislation than did any citizen of California. It’s also clear that Mr. Bezos was lobbying not for what was best for the people of the Golden State but what was best for Amazon.

I won’t bother to comment on Lecturer Nieli’s professional assessment of the psychological motivations (jealousy, spite) of those who oppose great inequality.

Perhaps Mr. Nieli lectures to his Princeton students that huge disparities in citizens’ power are true to the spirit of democracy. But then again, I’ve never known Princeton to be careful in its choice of lecturers.

Jay Livingston was a lecturer in the psychology department at Princeton. (True fact.)

A Christmas Repost

2011-12-25T05:44:00.008-05:00

December 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Economists, says Dan Ariely (WSJ article here), have a problem with gift giving. It does not fit into their models. It is supremely irrational. Some economists write as if they are actually offended by it, as though gift giving is literally unnatural, a violation of human nature. But if there is a “natural” economy, it is not an economy based on rational self-interest. It is the gift economy. Gift economies precede even barter economies. The rationalized market we take for granted is an economy-come-lately.

Matt Yglesias in Slate has a take similar to Ariely’s. He also has some suggestions for gifts.

Even I said something along the same lines two years ago, and I’m reposting it. If stores and radio stations can recycle the same old songs (including “mine”) every Christmas, and television can give us the same Christmas specials, why not?

--------------------------------------------

What was in those boxes we unwrapped and opened today? Gifts, most people would say.

But according to a Grinch-famous 1993 economics article by Joel Waldfogel, those boxes were also crammed with “deadweight loss” – the difference between what the giver paid for the book or bauble and what it was actually worth to the recipient.

Waldfogel surveyed Yale undergrads and concluded that “between a tenth and a third of the value of holiday gifts is destroyed by gift-giving.” Destroyed. That $40 sweater you gave to your cousin’s husband – you destroyed $10 of its value.

Here’s the key question Waldfogel put to his Yalies about gifts they’d received: “If you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to obtain them?”*

By this method, a really good gift would mean a high deadweight loss. For example, I would never pay more than $40 for a sweater for myself. No sweater to me is worth more than that. But suppose a good friend bought me a really, really nice $200 sweater. I love that sweater. I love it precisely because it’s an extravagance I never would have allowed myself. But the most I’d be willing to pay for it is $40. So according to Waldfogel, my friend destroyed $160 (80%) of the sweater’s value.

When I first heard about the Waldfogel study, I thought it was a bit of self-parody – like those jokes about engineers , where the engineer sees everything in terms of the concepts of his profession and thus misses the point. (Waldfogel, for example, refers to the “inefficiency” of gift-giving, as though the point of gift-giving were efficiency.) But Waldfogel wasn’t kidding. He just published a follow-up book, Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.

In fact, gift-giving has become increasingly rationalized and efficient. Children write letters to Santa specifying what they want; brides and grooms have bridal registries that do the same. Cash and gift cards are becoming more popular as gifts. There is no doubt that gift-giving is an economic exchange, and it would be silly to pretend that economic value has nothing to do with it (it’s the thought that counts). But it’s equally silly to think that it gifts are only economic and that they have no social meaning.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Taking Pictures or Making Pictures

2011-12-24T05:04:00.004-05:00

December 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

Ethnographers worry that their mere presence on the scene may be influencing what people do and thus compromising the truth of their studies. They try to minimize that impact, and most of their reports give detailed descriptions of their methods so that readers can assess whether the data might be corrupted.

Photojournalists also claim to be showing us the truth – “pictures don’t lie” – but they compunctions about influencing the people in their photos. Here for example is a photo taken in Israel by Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori. (This is a screen grab of a video, hence the subtitles.)

The defiant Palestinian youth, the flames of the roadblock – it’s all very dramatic. But it is far from spontaneous.

Salvadori studied anthropology, and he is well aware that observers influence what they observe. But editors want “good” photos, not good ethnography. So observer influence is an asset, not a problem.

If you point a tiny camera at somebody, what is he going to do? Most likely, he’s going to smile or do something. Now imagine this enlarged with a group of photographers. That show up with helmets, gas masks, and at least two large cameras each, and they come there to take photos of what you do. So you’re not going to sit there twiddling your thumbs.

No, the youths don’t twiddle their thumbs, not with the photogs on the scene. Instead, they burn a flag.

There relationship is symbiotic. The photogs want dramatic images, the insurgent youths want publicity. Of course, even with the Palestinians youths and the Israeli soldiers, when the action gets real, nobody is thinking about how they’ll look in a photo.

(The full 8-minute video of Salvadori talking about photography in the combat zone was posted at PetaPixel back in October, though I didn't hear about it until recently.)

Factor Loading

2011-12-20T13:52:00.000-05:00

December 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does my newsdealer know something I don’t?

Newsstands arrange their magazines by category. There are shelves for Women’s Fashion, Sports, Travel, etc. One of the newsstands at Penn Station had this interesting grouping.

Investors Business Daily and the Daily Racing Form. Hmmm.

Was I Sleeping in Econ 101?

2011-12-20T11:32:00.001-05:00

December 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Joe Nocera covers the business beat for the Times, and he’s now a regular on the op-ed page. I’m sure he knows more about economics than I do. But I was puzzled by the opening of today’s column about Fannie Ma and Freddie Mac

In their heyday, these strange hybrids — part corporation, part government agency — were the biggest bullies in Washington, quick to bludgeon critics who dared suggest that their dual missions of maximizing profits while making homeownership affordable for low- and moderate-income Americans were incompatible.

Apparently, Nocera agrees with the critics who thought those dual missions were incompatible. Maybe I doing my James Franco impersonation in Econ 101, but isn’t that the basic idea of free-market capitalism – that companies seeking to maximize their profits will make more stuff available at lower prices for buyers?

If those missions are incompatible, then capitalism is a very wrong-headed idea. But if Nocera is right, if powerful corporations pursuing profits do not always bring benefits to consumers, maybe we need to rethink anti-government, anti-regulation models and policies that treat Bank of America and Exxon-Mobil as though they were the local bodega.

(Nocera also says of the bullies, Fannie and Freddie, “they essentially wrote most of the legislation that affected them, which they larded with loopholes.” Much the same could be said of the banking and energy behemoths, especially when Republicans are shaping the legislation.)

Do You Hear What I Hear? Maybe Not.

2011-12-18T06:12:00.069-05:00

December 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

As I’ve said before (here), the question the researcher asks is not always the question people hear. That’s especially true when the question is about probabilities.

Here, for example, is the ending of a fictional vignette from a recent study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.

Is it more probable that Richard is
a. a teacher
b. a teacher and a rapist

Since the category “a teacher” necessarily includes teacher/rapists as well, the correct answer is “a.” But many people choose “b.” The study used this “conjunction fallacy”* to probe for prejudices by switching out the rapist for various other categories. Some subjects were asked about atheist/teachers, others about Muslim/teachers, and so on. The finding:

A description of a criminally untrustworthy individual was seen as comparably representative of atheists and rapists but not representative of Christians, Muslims, Jewish people, feminists, or homosexuals.

Andrew Gelman, a usually mild-mannered reporter on things methodological, had a post on this with the subject line, “This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf.”

What’s really disturbing about the study is that many people thought it was “more probable” that the dude is a rapist than that he is a Christian! Talk about the base-rate fallacy.

Maybe it would settle Andrew’s stomach to remember that the question the researchers asked was almost certainly not the question people heard. What the researchers pretend to be asking is this:

Of all thieves, which are there more of – teachers or rapist/teachers?

After all, that is indeed the literal meaning. But it’s pretty obvious that the question people are answering is something different:

Which group has a higher proportion of thieves among them – all teachers or the subset rapist/teachers?

The researchers say they weren’t at all interested in demonstrating the conjunction fallacy. They were just using it to uncover the distrust people feel towards atheists. What they found was that when it comes to dishonesty, people (specifically, 75 female and 30 male undergrads at the University of British Columbia) rank atheists at about the same level as rapists.

But why resort to such roundabout tricks? Why not ask the question directly?**

Who is more likely to steal a wallet when nobody is looking?
    a. an atheist
    b. a rapist
    c. neither; they are equally larcenous

Or:

On a seven-point scale, rank each of the following on how likely they would be to steal a wallet when nobody is looking:
    an atheist: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7
    a Christian: 1   2 3 4 5 6 7
    a rapist: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7
    etc.

Instead, they asked questions that they knew would confuse nearly anyone not fluent in the language of statistics and probability. I wonder what would happen if in their “who do you distrust” study they had included a category for experimental social psychologists.***

---------------
* Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky pretty much invented the conjunction fallacy thirty years ago with their “Linda problem,” and Kahneman discusses it in his recent book Thinking Fast and Slow. To get the right answer, you have to ignore intuition and make your thinking very, very slow. Even then, people with no background in statistics and logic may still get it wrong.

** The authors’ presentation of their results is also designed to frustrate the ordinary reader. Each condition (rapist/teacher, atheist/teacher, homosexual/teacher, etc.) had 26 (or in one case 27) subjects. The payoff was the number of errors in each group. But the authors don’t say what that number was. They give the chi-square, the odds ratios, the p’s and the b’s. But they don’t tell us how many of the 26 subjects thought that the wallet snatcher was more likely to be an atheist/teacher or a Christian/teacher than to be merely a teacher.

*** The JPSP is one of the most respected journals in the field, maybe the most respected, influential, and frequently cited, as I pointed out here.

Graphic Design the Fox News Way

2011-12-13T22:11:00.003-05:00

December 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The best way to lie with statistics, says Andrew Gelman, is just lie. This graph from Fox news is a visual version of that. It’s published at Flowingdata.com via Media Matters.

The numbers are correct, but the Foxy graphmongers are making up the Y-axis as they go along. The 8.6% of November is higher than than 8.8%, 8.9%, and maybe even the 9.0% of the first three months of the year.

Or maybe it’s an optical illusion.

[HT: Max Livingston]

The Descendants

2011-12-11T13:03:00.004-05:00

December 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Children in American movies are typically superior to adults. The kids are not only all right, they are wiser, less corrupt, and more competent. “Home Alone” is a classic example, where the plucky, resourceful kid triumphs over both the vindictiveness of the burglars and the mindlessness of his parents. (An earlier post on children in films is here.)

“The Descendants,” the recent film with George Clooney (I saw it last night), starts more like a French film, where children are, well, children, and it’s the parents who must endure and learn to cope with the kids’ immaturity and thoughtlessness.

Clooney is Matt King, and the name is a deliberate irony. Kinglike, he must decide the fate of a huge tract of pristine Kauai land that his family has owned for many generations. The money from the sale will make him and his many cousins and their families rich. Which developer will he sell the land to?

But as a husband and father he is far being monarch of all he surveys. His wife has been in an accident and lies in a coma. His two daughters are unapologetically impudent and insufferable. As the film starts, Scottie, age ten, has sent a nasty, obscene text to a classmate. Alex, seventeen, now at an expensive private rehab/therapeutic school, first appears on screen drunk, having sneaked out of her room at night with another girl. Then there’s Sid, Alex’s friend, a slightly older boy, all stupidity and insensitivity, a chubby incarnation of Beavis and Butthead.

Then the film magically transforms the kids. Each has been introduced as obtuse, obscene, or obnoxious. But now Alex, it turns out, knows more than her father does, at least in one crucial area – that his wife, now on life support, had been cheating on him.

The kids change from being French, a burden for the grown-up, to becoming almost classically American, not superior but equal. They are now his partners. Teens and adult are a team trying to discover the identity and location of the seducer so that King can confront him. The teenagers are suddenly much less difficult and much more helpful, while King sometimes appears uncertain and even silly, peering over hedges to spy on his wife’s lover. He asks his daughter for advice. He even asks Sid what he should do.

(You can get some sense of this transformation in the trailers, here and here, which also outline the rest of the story.)

Still, the movie doesn’t go pure Hollywood. It does not present the world as a character contest where good faces evil, where the right action is clear and the only question is how the hero will come to make it. Instead, it shows a grown-up trying to understand and cope with problems and people he cannot really control.

And nobody blows up a helicopter.

Loan Sharks

2011-12-08T06:31:00.003-05:00

December 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Back when I knew about such things, a typical arrangement with a loan shark was the standard $100 knock-down loan. The shylock gave you $100; you paid him back $20 a week for six weeks. It works out to something like 175% interest a year, maybe more since in the sixth week you’re paying $20 vig even though you’ve paid off the $100 principle. I think Sudhir Vankatesh found that Chicago loansharks were offering more extended payback periods, hence a lower rate. Still, when you consider that usury laws used to set the limit at less than 50%, 175% a year looks pretty steep.

I’m an upstanding professor, and I do not deal with loan sharks. Instead, I have a credit card with a highly respectable bank, J.P. Morgan Chase. Last month, I must have missed their e-mail alerting me to my bill, and I didn’t pay it. It was only $175. How much could my neglect possibly cost me? I mean, after all, I wasn’t dealing with some mobbed-up shylock. This was JP Morgan.

Here is what my bill for this month looks like.

In effect, the bank was lending me the $175 for a month. In return, they charged me $2.66 interest plus a $25 fee. That works out to nearly 190% a year.

In the great bank bailout, JP Morgan got about $25 billion (or was it $50 billion?) in government money. But in my bill-induced reverie, I imagine Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson saying to Jamie Dimon, “You got a nice bank here, and I’d hate to see it go under. So what do you say I fix you up with a $25 billion knockdown loan? By your standards, that's a bargain.”

Douche — Long-lasting?

2011-12-06T04:54:00.003-05:00

December 6, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A couple of years ago, I heard a thirty-ish professor evaluate something as “douchy.” It might have been a song, or a band, or maybe it was an article. I don’t remember, and it’s not important. But it did make me realize that this word was not in my active vocabulary. I was reminded of that again when a Facebook friend linked to this picture posted on the Facebook page of Kicking Ass for the Middle Class.

I have never called anyone a douche. Not even Sean Hannity. I must be too old; my lexicon of epithets must have solidified before douche and douchy came on the scene. But when was that? Surely, there are linguists who can tell us. And what was the path of diffusion?*

I also wonder whether douches are here to stay. I have the impression that negative epithets are relatively durable. Popular phrases come, and then they go. In a few years, will events still result from perfect storms? Will ingrates be throwing people under buses, while creative folk push envelopes and think outside boxes? These phrases are swell, but I suspect their time is limited. Ditto, I hope, for “my bad.” Happy campers are fading away like old soldiers, and all the superstars have been replaced by icons.

But shitheads and assholes have been around a long time and show no signs of leaving. Is it their location on the other side of respectability that gives them long life? Douche has its origins in body parts and actions usually kept out of sight, but the word itself isn’t quite over the line. In this way, it’s like suck, as in “this post sucks.” I know. But I did want to reprint that drug store photo.

------------------
* UPDATE: The Language Log was no help in this matter. A search for douche turned up mostly references to douchebag, and most of these were in the comments. One post does have a link to a 2009 New York Times article about words you can say on television. It quotes the creator of “Community”: “This is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years — a thing that sounds like a thing you can’t say.” He has the history (last couple of years) right. The Parents Television council counted 76 douches on 26 prime-time network series in 2009 (and the year still had seven weeks to go, though the year-end Christmas specials would probably be pulling down the average). That 76 compares with thirty in 2007 and six in 2005.

(HT: Jamie Fader)

Economics and Ethos

2011-12-05T08:14:00.041-05:00

December 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

The equation of wealth and virtue seems to come almost naturally, at least among the wealthy. The logic is simple: Virtue leads to success, therefore wealth is evidence of one’s virtue. Virtue, in this case, means the Protestant Ethic – hard work and a willingness to forgo or postpone pleasures. It follows then that those who are not wealthy must have turned their back on virtue.

David Brooks, in his Friday column (here), applies this explanation to the wealth of nations.

Why are nations like Germany and the U.S. rich? . . . It's because many people in these countries believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.

People who work hard and play by the rules should have a fair shot at prosperity. Money should go to people on the basis of merit and enterprise. Self-control should be rewarded while laziness and self-indulgence should not.

The US, Germany, and the Netherlands are Brooks’s exemplars of these virtues (Brooks uses the word ethos). The bad countries, the ones whose economies are teetering on the brink, are the grasshoppers to our ant. There they were – Brooks points his finger at Greece, Italy, and Spain – fiddling and dancing the summer away, refusing to live within their means or “reinforce good values.”

This seems accurate, doesn’t it – the dolce far niente Italians and other Mediterraneans, taking hours at midday for meals and siestas while the industrious Americans, Germans, and Dutch are working away, wolfing down a sandwich at their desks.

Just to be sure I downloaded some OECD data from 2007 – the last year before the big crash – on the number of hours people in different countries work. (Brooks’s three “ant” countries are red, the “grasshoppers” dark blue.)

This is puzzling. The US is slightly above the OECD average, but workers in Greece and Italy spend more hours at work than do Americans, while the Dutch and Germans are down at the low end of the scale. (I do not know why the OECD still gives data for West Germany as well as Germany.)

I noticed that the OECD also had a measure of “employment protection,” which is basically how hard it is to fire someone. I figured that workers in non-virtuous countries would be highly protected. Since it’s nearly impossible for them to be fired, they know they can slack off on the job. By contrast, virtuous countries would foster Brook's ethos of “effort, productivity and self-discipline” in workers, rewarding the industrious, firing the lazy and self-indulgent.

I wasn’t surprised that the US anchored the low end of the scale. Workers here have less job-protection than those in any of the other countries. And Greece and Spain are above the average. But so are Germany and the Netherlands, though only slightly, while Italy is slightly below the average. There’s really not much difference between these three. And if you look at the array of countries, there seems to be no strong connection between job protection and how well the country is weathering the current long recession. I’m not sure what the best measure of the overall economy is, but the OECD has composite figure made up from ten main economic indicators.*

I just wish we had better measure of Brooks’s “ethos.”

-------------------

* “The Labour Force Survey (MEI) dataset itself covers countries that compile labour statistics from sample household surveys on a monthly or quarterly basis. It is widely accepted that household surveys are the best source for labour market key statistics. In such surveys, information is collected from people living in households through a representative sample. Surveys are based on standard methodology and procedures used all over the world. The 10 subjects available cover labour force, employment, unemployment (including harmonised unemployment), and employees.”

Reliable Tests, Unreliable Test-takers

2011-12-02T10:17:00.001-05:00

December 2, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Great Neck is the epicenter of the cheating scandal – SATs, ACTs, fake IDs, hefty fees. High schoolers, or their families, paid the smart ringers as much as $3600 to take the exam for them.

The Times front page story today (here) notes that Great Neck, using the fake ID of West Egg, was the setting for The Great Gatsby, and the stories – fiction set in 1922, reality set in 2011 – are rich territory for comparison. Success, ambition, wealth, opulence, envy.

One student

was offered cash to take the test by a more popular student. Eager to impress, and perhaps get closer to the other student’s friends, he agreed, officials said; later, he scored a 31 on the ACT under the same student’s name.

Could that name have been Tom Buchanan?

Maybe there’s even an unrequited love story that didn’t make the papers.

But for the statistically minded, there’s this:

Samuel Eshaghoff, a 2010 Great Neck North graduate, scored in the 2,100 range (out of 2,400) on his own SATs; he is accused of taking tests for at least 15 people over three years, and the people briefed on the inquiry said he obtained scores for them between 2,170 and 2,220 on the SAT.

Those numbers, though they might be barely remarked by most Times readers, are probably the lede in the ETS edit of the story. The testing company might be faulted on security (“two of the people for whom [Mr. Eshagoff] is accused of taking the tests after showing a fake ID were girls”).

But fifteen takes with scores no more than 50 (of 2400) points apart – how’s that for reliability, old sport?

American Exceptionalism - The Cover Story

2011-12-02T00:17:00.001-05:00

December 2, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of these covers is not like the others, though all are the Dec. 5 edition of Time. (Hat tip to my colleague Sangeeta Parashar who found this image the OWS Facebook page.)

It reminded my of my third ever post to this blog in September 2006, showing covers of different editions Newsweek.

(Several other Websites and bloggers at the time – e.g., Kieran Healey at Crooked Timber – had the same images.)

The covers illustrate one aspect of “American Exceptionalism.” We are exceptionally uninterested in events outside our borders. Given a choice between hard news in some foreign land and lifestyle stories here in the US, gives happy young women, give us happy families, give us stories about how anxiety is good for us.

UPDATE: An off-blog comment noted that magazine covers affect mostly newsstand sales, not subscriptions. So the comparison “is not between all Americans and all people in other parts of the world, but between those people who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in the U.S. and those people in other countries who buy an English-language news magazine at a newsstand, airport bookstore, etc. in Europe, Asia, or Latin America.”

According to Wikipedia, Newsweek sells only about 40,000 newsstand copies compared with 1.5 million subscriptions. (Both figures are substantially lower than they were a decade ago.) The figures for Time are about double those of Newsweek, but the ratio of newsstand sales to subscriptions is about the same.

Casey Mulligan's Grapes

2011-11-29T13:07:00.001-05:00

November 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bloomberg reports (here) that the November increase in hiring – 120,000 jobs – will probably not affect the unemployment rate, which will remain at 9%.

Casey Mulligan, at the New York Times Economix blog, knows why unemployment is high: the safety net.

Government assistance programs have not only supported more people but become more generous, thanks to changes in benefit rules since 2007.
Of course, most people work hard despite a generous safety net, and 140 million people are still working today. But in a labor force as big as ours, it takes only a small fraction of people who react to a generous safety net by working less to create millions of unemployed. [emphasis added]

In February 2008, the official unemployment rate was 4.8% – about 7.4 million people. By October 2009, the rate had more than doubled to 10.1% or more than 15 million unemployed people.

Mulligan assures us that that in that 20-month period, “millions” of those newly-unemployed people decided that they preferred to live off government benefits rather than work.

I had thought that the sharp increase in unemployment was caused by the crash set off by the bursting of the housing bubble, with its inflated house prices and dubious financial schemes based on those prices. Companies were laying off workers or going out of business entirely. People didn’t lose their desire to work, they lost their jobs.

But what do I know? Mulligan is an economist at the prestigious University of Chicago, and presumably he has insight into the life-decisions of poor people. Still, I’m a bit puzzled because the official unemployment rate counts only those people who are looking for a job. So apparently they have chosen to live off government benefits and are lying when they say they are looking for work. I guess you just can’t trust these people who aren’t working.

Mulligan’s solution to the unemployment, consistent with his view of its cause, is to cut these overly generous benefits.

I suspect that employment cannot return to pre-recession levels until safety-net generosity does, too.

He’s talking mostly about the magnanimous $330 a week unemployment check, but he may also have in mind other programs like TAFN, food stamps, and the rest.

(more after the break – or what should be a break if this new version of Blogger is working correctly)

Maybe Mulligan is right. Ezra Klein, looking for the good old days before the safety net, dusted off his copy of The Grapes of Wrath and found this passage. It starts with the orange handbill that drew the Joads to California.

“Pea Pickers Wanted in California. Good Wages All Season. 800 Pickers Wanted.”

When they get to California, the Joad family cannot find work and are at first puzzled. They ask a young man leaving the Hooverville that they are entering .

He looked in amazement at Tom. "Lookin’ for work?” he said. “So you’re lookin’ for work. What ya think ever’body else is lookin’ for? Di’monds? What you think I wore my ass down to the nub look’n for?”
Tom said, “Back home some fellas come through with han’bills -- orange ones. Says they need lots a people out here to work the crops.”
The young man laughed. “They say they’s three hundred thousan’ us folks here, an’ I bet ever’ dam’ fam’ly seen them han’bills.”

“Yeah, but if they don’ need folks, what’d they go to the trouble puttin’ them things out for?”

“Look,” the young man said. “S’pose you got a job at work, an’ there’s jus’ one fella wants the job. You got to pay ‘im what he asts. But s’pose they’s a hundred men.” He put down his tool. His eyes hardened and his voice sharpened. “S’pose they’s a hundred men wants that job. S’pose them men got kids, an’ them kids is hungry. S’pose a lousy dime’ll buy a box a mush for them kids. S’pose a nickel’ll buy at leas’ somepin for them kids. An’ you got a hundred men. Jus’ offer ‘em a nickel – why, they’ll kill each other fightin’ for that nickel.”

Klein adds, “Economists would bloodlessly describe this arrangement between workers and employers as ‘an equilibrium.’” Unemployment benefits – “paying people not to work” as the Wall Street Journal called it – disrupts this equilibrium.

As we now know, the Joads and the US were lucky. Imagine how much worse unemployment would have been in the 1930s if the US had suffered from today’s job-killing government handouts.

In Other Words

2011-11-28T05:58:00.015-05:00

November 28, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

From The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman

Reciprocal typifications of actgions are built up in the course of a shared history. . . .

The habitualizations and typifications undertaken in the common life of A and B, formations that until this point still had the quality of ad hoc conceptions of two individuals, now become historical institutions. . . . This means that the institutions that have now been crystallized . . . are experiences as existing over and beyond the individuals who “happen to” embody them at the moment. In other words, the institutions are now experienced as possessing a reality of their own, a reality that confronts the individual as external and coercive fact.

From Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin

The daily things we do
For money or for fun
Can disappear like dew
Or harden and live on.
Strange reciprocity:
The circumstance we cause
In time gives rise to us,
Becomes our memory.

Thanksgiving — a Classroom Memory

2011-11-24T08:57:00.001-05:00

November 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you become a teacher
By your pupils you’ll be taught
— Oscar Hammerstein, “The King and I”

It was my Monday-Tuesday-Thursday criminology class, and the two guys, both tall and slightly overweight, always sat in the back row together. They weren’t the best students in the class, but I liked them because they were willing to get into the discussion, often with something that was both on-topic and funny.

This was decades ago. One day I was talking after class with one of them., and our conversation drifted to the topic of footbal and betting. “George is incredible,” he said. “Every Thursday he gives me a couple of teams for the weekend. He’s like nineteen and one. This guy is paying my tuition.”

The next week was Thanksgiving, and on Tuesday, I ended class wishing the students all a good holiday. Then I said, “So George, what do you like this weekend?”

Without missing a beat, George leaned back, raised his index finger to indicate certainy, and said, “The Lions at home on Turkey Day.”

I can’t remember if the Lions won, but I’m sure they covered. I did not forget or ignore his words of wisdom, not that year, or the next, or the next. As I said, this was decades ago. In recent years you could have lost a lot of money following his advice. This year, the Packers are seemingly unstoppable. They opened as 5½ or 6 point favorites and the line got bet up as high as 7 before settling down to 6 or 6½ this morning. But the Lions are much improved team this year.

UPDATE: The betting public must have been paying attention. A lot of money came in on Detroit, and by game time the spread had dropped to 4½ or even 4. It looked like a test for my skepticism about “wisdom of crowds” in sports betting (see an earlier blog post here with links to even earlier posts). The crowd was on Detroit, and the crowd lost its shirt. The Packers won 27-15.

I wonder what George would say.

Constructing Value

2011-11-23T05:47:00.032-05:00

November 23, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

I don’t know the sociological research on auctions – surely it must exist – but auctions seem like a wonderful illustration of how value is socially constructed. I didn’t really need to be convinced that people don’t always live up to economists’ ideals of rationality, but I was reminded of it on Saturday when I watched the auction of items from my mother’s “estate” (i.e., stuff in her apartment). I wasn’t in the actual auctiion room; nowadays you can watch – and bid – online.

As someone who is relatively ignorant about art, I of course was puzzled as to why one piece was worth several hundred dollars while another might fetch only a $50 or no bids at all. But I thought that potential buyers would have an idea of how much something is worth – the objects and information about them are all available beforehand – and they would bid and stop bidding according to these prior valuations. But look at this lithograph, which graced my parents’ wall for as long as I can remember.

The opening asking price was $20.* None of the people at the auction house or online would offer that much. For the potential bidders, the picture was not worth $20.

The auctioneer then lowered the opening bid to $10. Someone offered the ten bucks. A bargain. But then someone else bid $20. The picture which had not been worth $20 suddenly was. And then it was worth $30. You can see the bidding history to the right of the lithograph. The bidders were reluctant – twice someone came in just as the gavel was about to come down – but in the end, the picture that nobody thought was worth $20 eventually sold for twice that much. In the interval of a few minutes, this minimal interaction between bidders had quadrupled the value of the picture.

There’s also a cognitive-dissonance explanation. If I bid $10 for the item, I’m not just telling myself, “I think this picture is worth $10.” Instead, the message is more general: “I want this picture.” Once we decide to buy something, our subjective valuation of it goes up – we’re more comfortable thinking that we got a good deal than thinking that we wasted our money. Most transactions end there; we buy something at a price, and we are happy with it. But an auction encourages us to turn that subjective valuation into hiigher and higher cash bids.

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* It can be a bit daunting, depressing even, to think that a picture so familiar that it feels like a part of your life turns out to be worth so little to other people.

The Weekly Car Crash

2011-11-21T08:26:00.001-05:00

November 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Every couple of years, I'll see a piece about the reality of pro football that makes me want to stop watching. This time, it was a nicely edited piece (here) that Greg Bishop at the Times stitched together from interviews with Kris Jenkins, a former interior lineman for the Jets and Panthers.

N.F.L. fans, people outside, they have no clue what goes on. This isn’t like playing Madden.
You ever been in a car crash? . . . Football is like that. But 10 times worse. It’s hell.

After I read an article like this, I may leave the TV off for a week or two, maybe more if it’s early in the season and the weather is still like summer. But eventually I go back. So do the players, even though they know all too well the immediate pain and the long-term damage.

There aren’t too many places a 400-pound guy with an attitude can go and beat the crap out of somebody and not get locked up for it.

The entire article is worth reading.

Constructing Character

2011-11-17T06:02:00.072-05:00

November 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ross Douthat, a Catholic and a conservative, is grappling with what he calls “the sins of Joe Paterno.” Douthat draws a parallel with a Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, who worked admirably in Colombia – against poverty, against hunger, against the Medellin cartel – but then denied, minimized, and helped cover up sexual abuse in the Church.

How did the man who displayed so much moral courage in Colombia become the cardinal who was so morally culpable in Rome? In the same way, perhaps, that college football’s most admirable coach — a mentor to generations of young men, a pillar of his Pennsylvania community — could end up effectively washing his hands of the rape of a young boy. . . .

Here, abbreviated, is Douthat’s explanation:

Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. . . .

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. (The full Times op-ed is here.)

There’s much to be said (which is why this post is too long). First of all, Douthat has no real knowledge of what Paterno or the cardinal were thinking or what “illusions” they carried in their minds. This is pure speculation, based on the relatively few facts that have become newsworthy. I too have read about JoePa over the years, and I have seen him on my television, pacing the sidelines. But I don’t think for a minute – well, maybe for a minute – that I know what’s going on in his psyche.

Second, the behavior of these two heroes is puzzling only because of Douthat’s basic assumption, the assumption of personal consistency. It’s one that most of us make. We attribute far too much consistency to other people. We judge a person to be good and heroic or bad and mediocre, often on the basis of a very few bits of information. We then assume that the good people will always do what is good, and the mediocre will always do what is weak. After that, it’s easy to float on the tide of confirmation bias. Most of the time we don’t see evidence to the contrary, or if we do see it, we don’t notice it.

But when a discrepancy becomes unavoidable, we struggle, as Douthat does, to come up with explanations – but only explanations which do not disrupt that basic assumption about consistency or “character.” As Nabokov (speaking in Humbert’s voice) says,

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen ‘King Lear,’ never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten . . . . The less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

As Nabokov indicates, we apply this hard carapace of consistency not just to distant, famous figures, but to our friends and neighbors. This constructing and attribution of characteristics goes on continuously, as Goffman pointed out long ago (around the same time that Nabokov was writing Lolita). We are always sizing up other people, forming impressions of them; and we are aware – sometimes painfully aware – that they are doing the same to us. From a single act, people classify us as having the trait that goes with that act.

Jay Smooth notes this same process in conversations about race. If you point to some action or comment by a person, they often assume that you are also judging their entire character.

“Are you saying that I am a racist? I am a good person. How could you say that I’m a racist?”
And you try to respond, “No, I’m talking about the particular thing that you said.”
“No, I am not a racist.”
And what started out as a what-you-said conversation turns into a what-you-are conversation. (video here, starting at about 1:20 You should watch the clip. Jay Smooth is better in person than in print. ht: Angie Andriot and Jenn Lena)

Of course, nobody wants to be thought of as a racist. But we often resist positive and even flattering characterizations. Those heroes we admire so much never think of themselves as heroes – not Superman, not Sully. They were just doing their job or their duty. Besides, they know all those facts about themselves, facts too ordinary to be mentioned in the media, which are unheroic. No man is a hero to his valet, and in this Goffmanesque, information-control sense, we are all our own valets. We know too much about ourselves to characterize ourselves as only heroic, villainous, or anything else.

Paterno’s culpability, whatever it is, can be especially unsettling to a Ross Douthat not just because it threatens an image of JoePa as hero,* but because it threatens a whole theory of human character. But if we are making judgments, we’re probably more accurate in labeling actions rather than actors.

If only Douthat had been listening to Jay Smooth.

We need to move away from the premise that being a good person is a fixed, immutable characteristic, and shift toward seeing being good as a practice.

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* Douthat has come in for criticism for his choice of heroes. But Douthat’s detractors engage in the same kind of labeling. Kos, for example (here), sees Paterno and the cardinal not as heroes but as “assholes.” The valence is negative rather than positive, but the process of character construction is the same.

Morality — Drawing the Line (and Erasing Part of It)

2011-11-15T13:08:00.000-05:00

November 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Morality is based on the group. Whether an act is right or wrong depends on which side of the group boundary people are on. That’s one of the points I’ve been trying to make in class recently. The general topic is religion, specifically Durkheim’s notion that god, belief, ritual, and other components of religion, including morality, are all about group solidarity.

Case in point – bullying. It’s been in the news periodically for a long while now, with stories of schoolkids who commit suicide after enduring continual bullying from their peers – in person and now online. And for every suicide, there are many, many more victims who never make the headlines but who suffer similar bullying. The statistics that get thrown around are questionable, but regardless of the actual scope of the problem, bullying is nasty stuff, and we’d like to have our children doing less of it.*

Many states are passing anti-bullying laws. That’s what we do here in America. If we don’t like something, rather than frame it as a problem and seek a solution, we take a moralistic view, especially if we are conservatives with a preference for “moral clarity.” We declare it bad or even “evil,” we criminalize it, and we punish people who do it.

But if morality depends on group boundaries – Us and Them – what do we do when the bullies are Us, and the victims are Them? If we’re Michigan Republicans, we give Our bullies an indulgence.

On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled state senate passed an anti-bullying bill that manages to protect school bullies instead of those they victimize. It accomplishes this impressive feat by allowing students, teachers, and other school employees to claim that “a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction” justifies their harassment. (The Time article is here).

Translation: your Christian beliefs give you a free pass to bully kids you think are gay.

See, the trouble with just a plain bullying law is that it might punish one of Us for bullying one of Them. And it’s pretty clear that Us is conservative Christians, and Them is gay kids.

Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, [has] referred to anti-bullying measures as “a Trojan horse for the homosexual agenda.

The legislators in Michigan, some of them, have been trying to pass an anti-bullying bill for nearly ten years. The proposed bill was called “Matt’s Safe School Law,” named for a bullying victim who committed suicide in 2002. The Repulicans consistently weakened the bill’s provisions and then attached the “religious beliefs” exemption, so even Democrats voted against it.

In that ten year period, at least ten Michigan bullying victims have committed suicide.

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* Not all of us, of course. Somewhere in my files I have a WSJ piece from a decade ago by Joseph Epstein, who was downright nostalgic about bullying as he recalled his Chicago childhnood. “If one couldn't oneself enjoy the bullying of the larger over the smaller, there was still the simple delight of ganging up, the many against the one.”

Costly Thy Habitus . . .

2011-11-12T10:56:00.001-05:00

November 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

From Liquidated, by Karen Ho

Massive corporate restructurings are not caused so much by abstract financial models as by the local, cultural habitus of investment bankers, the mission-driven narratives of shareholder value and the institutional culture of Wall Street.

Yes, you read that correctly: habitus, narratives, and culture trump finance.

Here’s more from the Financial Times review by Gillian Tett (she’s the FT reporter with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology who called the crash two years before it happened).

It has become painfully clear that bankers placed far too much faith on their quasi-scientific models. It has also been evident that a grasp of cultural dynamics is critical in understanding how modern finance works – or doesn’t.

Ho’s central argument borrows heavily from the work of Pierre Bourdieu . . . [and] the concept of the “habitus” – the idea that a society develops a cognitive map to order its world that is usually based on its physical experience, albeit in ways the participants are only dimly aware of.
In the case of Wall Street, Ho argues that the “habitus” is shaped by bankers’ educational experience and employment history. Modern financiers live in a world where jobs are insecure, and where bankers are paid by trading things or cutting deals. They tend to project their experience on to the economy by aspiring to make everything “liquid”, or tradable, including jobs and people.

Surveys and Confirmation Bias

2011-11-10T07:39:00.001-05:00

November 10, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When he taught research methods as a grad student, Michael Schwartz gave his students this assignment: “Create a survey to show . . .” and he would tell them the conclusion he wanted the survey to support. The next week, he’d give them the same assignment but with the desired conclusion the opposite of the first one.

A year and a half ago, I criticized (here) a much publicized study by Dan Klein and Zeljka Buturovic: “This survey, I said, “wasn’t designed to discover what people think. It was designed to prove a political point,” and that point was that liberal ideology blinds people to economic facts.

I was reminded of Mike’s assignment when I read Klein’s recent article at The Atlantic. In a bit of academic fairness that’s probably all too rare, Klein went on to create a survey designed to see if conservative ideology has a similar effect.

Klein hoped that his conservative and libertarian allies would not so readily agree with politically friendly economic ideas that were nevertheless unsound. But conservatives in the new survey were “equally stupid” as the liberals in the earlier survey.

Klein also expected some nasty nyah-nyahing from his liberal critics. But no, “The reaction to the new paper was quieter than I expected.” In fact, one of those critics, Matt Yglesias, provides Klein with his takeaway from the two surveys: “there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there.”

Yes, but confirmation bias is not just something that affects people who respond to surveys. As Mike’s assignment makes clear, we also need to be wary of confirmation bias on the part of those who create the surveys. There is the further problem I mentioned in my earlier post: a one-shot survey is inherently ambiguous. We can’t be sure just what the respondents really hear when they are asked the question.

My own takeaway, besides admiration for Klein’s honesty, is that when you design your research as a statement (proving some point), you don’t learn nearly as much as when you design it as a genuine question.

Defining Deviance — Up and Down

2011-11-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

November 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Most of the increase in economic inequality over the past two or three decades comes from the enormous growth in money going to the very rich. David Brooks attributes that growth in part to a change in culture.*

You see a shift in social norms. Up until 1970 or so, a chief executive would have been embarrassed to take home more than $20 million. But now there is no shame, and top compensation zooms upward.

It’s what Daniel Patrick Moynihan nearly two decades ago (1993) called “defining deviancy down.” Things which had once been a matter of shame have become acceptable. Norms change.

But they don’t change all by themselves – as though they were part of some “low-pressure system” or “cold air mass” moving into the region. And the change is not always towards looser standards. Moral entrepreneurs campaign to define deviancy up, and sometimes they succeed. If we were back in the pre-feminist, Mad Men world of the 1950s, Herman Cain wouldn’t be having his current problems. But those pesky women, in just a few decades, have changed the general view of men using a position of power to get laid. Once accepted, maybe even admired, and envied, it’s now something a guy doesn’t want other people, even his friends, to know about.

Mad Men shows us some other examples of deviance defined up. Look in on an ad agency today and you won’t see anyone smoking. A few souls may go out to the street for a cigarette break, but we see their smoking as a addiction not pleasure, something to be pitied. Nor will you see anyone coming back drunk from a three-martini lunch or pouring himself a tumbler of Canadian Club in his office. Score one for the anti-tobacco and anti-drunkenness forces.

Besides moral entrepreneurship, norms can change as a matter of invidious social comparison – when those lower down the social scale take cues from those above them. Fashions in clothes or names filter down through the class structure. So do ideas of unacceptable behavior. In the 18th century, new canons of manners start with the court, then the aspiring gentry, and eventually even commoners are embarrassed by the audible belch or fart. In the 21st century, it’s not that we suddenly realized that drinking at work or smoking are harmful. Rather, as my British friend once said, “it isn’t done” – meaning that it isn’t done by people of our social position. In fact, moral entrepreneurs might be more successful if instead of trying to convince people that something is wrong, they tried to convince them it was low class.

As Oscar Wilde said,

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. (HT: Mark Kleiman)

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* Years ago, Paul Krugman offered a similar explanation.

Patriotism Goes to the Movies

2011-11-07T18:19:00.025-05:00

November 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Patriotism,” says Paul Krugman. “is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.” Krugman (in his blog, here ) was citing Michael Lind’s Slate article about “The Patriot,” the 2000 film starring Mel Gibson. Lind complains that the Patriot of the title, “sits out the American Revolution, until a sadistic . . . British commander kills one of his sons. whereupon he spends the next two days – oops, I mean two hours – avenging himself.”

That’s not patriotism, harrumphs Lind, it’s “amoral familism”*

It appears that today's audiences can't imagine any cause that could justify political violence other than injury to a child or wife.
This movie is deeply subversive of patriotism. Indeed, patriotism is a concept that neither the screenwriter . . nor the director . . . seems to understand.

Maybe so. But the writer and director do understand something that Lind apparently does not: movies are not real life. If they are, then “Singin’ in the Rain” is deeply subversive of rational reactions to meteorological events.

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but it’s no refuge at all for a filmmaker. Real-life Americans are patriotic, sometimes to an extent others find offensive. But that kind of patriotism doesn’t make for good movies. In the American movies that I know, good guys never do their good deeds out of abstract idealism. Their motives are always personal. (Even better than a non-ideoogical hero is the character who has an ideology but abandons it in order to kill bad guys – e.g., Grace Kelly in “High Noon”).

America movie-heroes often take up arms against bad guys, but we would mistrust a hero whose actions are purely ideological and not rooted in personal revenge. Our heroes, even when they are fighting for Good, have the decency to deny any ideological motive. Here’s one familiar (I hope) example:

I’m afraid Michael Lind would be disappointed in Rick, and in Grace Kelly shooting the bad guy to protect her husband. “[In] the Zeitgeist in the United States in A.D. 2000 . . . American national patriotism is giving way . . .to the perennial rival of patriotism at all levels: amoral familism.”

If that’s the Zeitgeist, it’s a Geist that goes back a long Zeit. “Casablanca” was made in 1942, “High Noon” in 1952. Or take another classic from the early 1950s, “On the Waterfront.” Marlon Brando winds up doing the right thing in ratting out the racketeer union boss (the right thing according to the film’s construction of morality). But it’s not until he has a personal reason – the union boss has his brother Charley killed – that he takes action.

You gave it to Joey, you gave it to Dugan, and you gave it to Charley who was one of your own.. . and I’m glad what I done to you!

The film’s attempts to make stevedores spout lofty motives ring embarrasingly false, as when one of the longshoremen urges Brando to defy the boss in order to

give us back our union, so we can run it on the up and up.

(I still cringe when I hear that line.)

Is this bias towards the personal and against the political an aspect of American culture? Or is it the medium? Maybe political ideals – socialist realism, capitalist realism, patriot realism, etc. – don’t make for compelling movies. Movies are first about characters, not ideas. The medium washes out the message.

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* The term comes from Edward Banfield’s 1958 book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Amoral familism, according to Banfield, was that basis.

Lying With Statistics, and Really Lying With Statistics

2011-11-04T10:28:00.001-04:00

November 4, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

“The #1 way to lie with statistics is . . . to just lie!” says Andrew Gelman, who a) knows much about statistics and b) is very good at spotting statistical dishonesty.

But maybe there’s a difference between lying with statistics and just plain making stuff up.

I’ve commented before about social psychologists’ affinity for Candid-Camera deception, but this Dutch practitioner goes way beyond that. [The Telegraph has the story .]

The committee set up to investigate Prof Stapel said after its preliminary investigation it had found "several dozen publications in which use was made of fictitious data" . . .

[Stapel’s] paper that linked thoughts of eating meat eating with anti-social behaviour was met with scorn and disbelief when it was publicised in August, it took several doctoral candidates Stapel was mentoring to unmask him. . . .

the three graduate students grew suspicious of the data Prof Stapel had supplied them without allowing them to participate in the actual research. When they ran statistical tests on it themselves they found it too perfect to be true and went to the university's dean with their suspicions.

What’s truly unsettling is to think that maybe he’s not the only one.

Abstract Preferences and Real Choices

2011-11-03T08:29:00.001-04:00

November 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

We’ve known for a long time that surveys are often very bad at predicting behavior. To take the example that Malcom Gladwell uses, if you ask Americans what kind of coffee they want, most will say “a dark, rich, hearty roast.” But what they actually prefer to drink is “milky, weak coffee.”

Something that sounds good in the abstract turnsout to be different from the stuff you actually have to drink.

Election polls usually have better luck since indicating your choice to a voting machine isn’t all that different from speaking that choice to a pollster. But political preference polls as well can run into that abstract-vs.-actual problem.

Real Clear Politics recently printed some poll results that were anything but real clear. RCP looked at polls matching Obama against the various Republican candidates. In every case, if you use the average results of the different polls, Obama comes out on top. But in polls that matched Obama against “a Republican,” the Republican wins.

The graph shows only the average of the polls. RCP also provides the results
of the various polls (CNN, Rasmussen, ABCl, etc.)

Apparently, the best strategy for the GOP is nominate a candidate but not tell anyone who it is.

The Distribution of the Wealthy

2011-11-02T12:33:00.001-04:00

November 2, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

After reading David Brooks’s column in the Times yesterday, I was catching up on podcasts of KCRW’s “The Business.” The installment from three weeks ago included a short clip from the “30 Rock” pilot:

DONAGHY: Sure. I gotcha. New York, third wave feminist. College educated. Single and pretending to be happy about it. Over scheduled, under sexed. You buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover. And... Every two years you take up knitting for... a week.

Like Jack Donaghy, David Brooks gets a lot of mileage out of cultural stereotypes. That’s because there’s some truth to them. Yesterday, the day after Halloween, he went back to the closet and pulled out his favorite costumes – two Blue, two Red.

The two costumes in each color reveal a basic inequality. In the Blue

the urban elites, concocting complex financial deals and buying expensive merch
the unwealthy liberal liberal-arts majors in Zucotti Park.

In the Red

the solid middle-class, unpretentious and hard-working
dropouts struggling to find work and keep their families together – struggling but too often failing.

The Red inequality, says Brooks, is more important yet less noticed.

The Blue inequality is confined to “New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia.” The Red inequality is “everywhere else.”

These costumes are colorful; they capture our attention. But they can mask other realities.* As Brad de Long points out, the economic and social gulf between the educated and the uneducated – Brooks’s Red inequality – is just as wide, perhaps wider, in New York as in Fresno. Brad also unfairly goes to Forbes magazine and waves the page showing the geography of the very wealthiest. It looks like there’s a bit of Bluish inequality in the heartland too.

“I count 6 of the top 10 living in regions where Brooks claims people like them don't live,” Brad says. But three of those six are Waltons (John-boy didn’t make the list this year), and ten is hardly all of the top 1%.

Howard Wial at the Atlantic uses IRS data to give a more complete picture. He uses $200,000 household income as his cutoff point – the top 3% rather than the 1%. But while the lives at the 99th percentile may be different from those only at th 97th, the maps are probably similar.

Here’s where the wealthy are.

The twenty MSAs shown in shades of green (nice choice) account for slightly more than half of all such households. Which means that nearly half of the top 3% live everywhere else. The New York area is home to 11.5% of the wealthy. But then, it’s home to more people of every income. So Wial looks at the ratio of wealthy to nonwealthy. A handful of rich folks can make a difference in a small population like Washoe County, NV and Natrona County, WY, which go from gray to green (who’s rich in Casper?). But in Phoenix, the population is so large that the although many wealthy people live there (2% of all wealthy people in the US), they are under-represented.

It’s not surprising that the Occupy movement started in New York, nor that it has spread to other places highlighted in these maps. But as Wial says, Occupy protests have also sprung up in “such seemingly unlikely locales as Anderson, Indiana, and Texarkana, Texas.”

If you’re looking for only red and blue, you’ll miss a lot of interesting purple shades, from magenta and mauve to puce and plum.

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* Brooks has done this before, notably in Bobos in Paradise. See Sasha Issenberg’s article http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos_in_paradise/ in PhillyMag for notes on Brooks’s blindness to inconvenient realities and his just plain making stuff up.

Start-ups and Safety Nets

2011-10-30T12:08:00.001-04:00

October 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images.

Is socialized medicine the road to serfdom, a snare that will sap people of their independence? Or is it liberating?

James Wimberly had a great post yesterday at The Reality Based Community (here), and I’m neither to proud nor too ethical to steal his data and summarize his idea.

George W. Bush did not really say, “The problem with the French is that they have no word for entrepreneur.” But that statement does fit with the American tendency to view our country as the land of entrepreneurship (literally “enterprise”). America is, after all, the land of opportunity, where anyone can become rich. And the way to get rich is to be an independent, risk-taking entrepreneur and start your own business. That’s what we do here in the US, and we do it better than most. At least that’s what we think.

But look at this chart showing the rate of start-ups per working-age population.

The US ranks 23rd. That doesn’t quite square with all those photo-ops where the president (Obama, Bush, Clinton – they all do it) goes to some small successful company out in the heartland. What is it about these other countries that makes for more risk-takikng?

Wimberly has an answer: the safety net. He makes the point with an analogy – his own photos of kids on a rope-walk – a single rope hung between two platforms in what looks like the Brazilian rain forest. (It’s really just a replanted hillside, formerly the site of a favela). The kids have safety devices – hard hats, a safety harness, guide-ropes to hold on to. Without these, only a few of the most f oolhardy would try a Philippe Petit walk. But the safety devices allow lots of kids to take a risk they would otherwise avoid.

The same logic applies to small business.

How many Americans are locked into jobs they hate by the fear of losing health benefits? No Dane ever has to worry about losing her right to medical care by quitting her job to go it alone

Safety devices cost money, but they pay off. On the rope-walk, you can see the reward in the expression on the kids’ faces when they reach the other platform. In the national data, you see it in the those start-ups.

The countries with significantly higher startup rates than the USA are those with stronger, more comprehensive, and more centralised social safety nets, along with correspondingly higher taxation.

See Wimberly’s entire post – with the photos, footnotes, and comments – for a fuller explanation.

The Use of Bad Words (Two F**king Links)

2011-10-29T13:21:00.000-04:00

October 29, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m not a huge fan of curse words, though I know some people swear by them. Repeat them, and they quickly lose whatever effect they might have had,* and then what do you use for emphasis or suprise.

There are exceptions, like Ian Frazier’s “Cursing Mommy” (here for example). And then there’s Colin Nissan’s recent essay in McSweeny’s on decorative gourds for autumn. I laughed out loud when I read it. Then I went back and mentally removed the curse words, and it was just not funny. Try it.

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* Sometimes draining the word of its impact is the goal of such repetition, as when David Bradley (you mean you haven’t read The Chaneysville Incident?) teaches Huckleberry Finn to high school students.

“One of the first things I do is I make everybody say it out loud about six or seven times,” Bradley said.
“The N-word?” Pitts [the “60 Minutes” inteviewer] asked.
“Yeah, ‘nigger.’ Get over it,” Bradley replied, laughing. “You know. Now let's talk about the book.”

Words and Pictures

2011-10-27T08:05:00.002-04:00

October 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Newspapers report facts – thing that actually happened. They run photos of things that actually happened. They don’t make stuff up. But they do choose which facts to report, and they do choose which photos to run. Usually the two are congruent.

But not always. Wonkette ran this photo of a page from the Washington Post.

Wonkette and other sites have contrasted the photo with this video of a cop deliberately firing a tear gas canister at close range directly at a group of demonstrators who had come to aid of someone who had been hit in the head with a tear gas canister.

But what’s also noteworthy is the contrast between the photo (nice cop, nice kitty, nothing violent happening here) and the Post’s own lede: “Police fired tear gas and beanbags. . . .”

You’re the Boss?

2011-10-26T11:39:00.003-04:00

October 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Why do people work? More specifically, why do some people work more and others less?

N. Gregory Mankiw has an idea, which he shared with us in Sunday’s New York Times.

Here are two facts about the French economy. First, gross domestic product per capita in France is 29 percent less than it is in the United States, in large part because the French work many fewer hours over their lifetimes than Americans do. Second, the French are taxed more than Americans. In 2009, taxes were 24 percent of G.D.P. in the United States but 42 percent in France.

Economists debate whether higher taxation in France and other European nations is the cause of the reduced work effort and incomes there. Perhaps it is something else entirely — a certain joie de vivre that escapes the nose-to-the-grindstone American culture.

The French spend about 15% less time, on average, in paid work each day (251 minutes to our 289). (OECD summary and spreadsheet here). Over a lifetime, as Mankiw says, those 38 minutes a day add up to many fewer hours over the course of a lifetime. (I’m not sure why lifetime hours is the appropriate measure when GDP is computed as an annual figure. Whatever.)

Mankiw is an economist, a very successful economist – best-selling textbook, head of Bush II’s Council of Economic Advisers, currently Mitt Romney’s chief economic adviser. So he takes the economist’s view of motivation: how much people work depends on how much money they can make. (Mankiw throws in that bit about culture, but I doubt he puts much stock in it and that what he thinks work is really all about is making money and keeping it, i.e., income and taxes.)

Mankiw seems to assume that the decision of how much to work rests entirely with the worker. That’s certainly true for Mankiw himself (see my earlier post on Mankiw’s work decisions here ). But many of us workers don’t have that kind of autonomy. So to get another view of sources of input into this decision of how much to work, I turned to the economic observations of Eddie Cochran:

Every time I call my baby, and try to get a date
My boss says, “No dice son, you gotta work late.”

Yes Gregory, there are bosses. Even in our American “nose-to-the-grindstone” culture, people say, “I have to work late tonight.” Have you ever heard anyone say, “I’m going to work late tonight because I want to make more money – especially now that my income tax has been reduced by two percentage points”? No doubt, there are people like that. But most of the hours in the French and US data are accounted for by people whose hours are determined by external forces.*

That French employee doesn’t just decide all by himself, “I think I’ll spend an extra hour at lunch today and give up an hour’s wage.” How much we work is economic and maybe a little cultural. It’s also a matter of politics. There are contracts and laws that are the outcome of organized efforts – by unions and political parties – to limit how much employers can demand of employees. Those laws that affect how much people work may be shaped by culture – shared ideas about work and life. It’s less clear that they are shaped by taxes.

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* In the last two years, many people in the US are working shorter hours than they were before 2008. Some have reduced their work hours to zero. I doubt that this reduction reflects an increased joie de vivre.

It seems incredible to me that a guy as smart as Mankiw can ignore those external constraints on people, assuming instead that workers make these decisions as free and independent individuals, unfettered by institutions, calculating their individual benefits and costs. But now I’m reminded of Fabio Rojas’s post of nearly five years ago, “What Economists Should Learn From Sociology.” Number two on Fabio’s list was “Social networks/social structure matters. Simple idea but few economists sit around and model the effects of social structure.”

The Big Shill

2011-10-25T10:22:00.001-04:00

October 25, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

Jay Smooth, posted a rap (here) with an outstanding analogy. The media, he says, in its reaction to Occupy Wall Street, is like the shill in the three-card monte game. (Mr. Smooth did not name names, but you get the sense he watches a lot of Fox.)

The ringer’s* job is to pretend they’re an objective outside observer commenting on the game when they’re actually part of the hustle who’s there to help bamboozle the public into thinking this game is legitimate.

Like this other Jay, I too used to watch the 3-card-monte teams in Times Square back in the 80s.
I liked listening to the dealers’ rhythmic, rhyming rap, and I admired the sleight-of-hand. (The basic move is very simple, but sometimes you’d see a truly skillful dealer who could work the bent-corner variation.)

Mostly, I took a Goffman-esque delight in watching the game, seeing how each person played his role, creating the illusion that the game was honest and winnable, trying to manipulate potential marks using no weapon except self-presentation. Even when a knowing mark did pick the right card, the team had a ruse to avoid the loss while still keeping the appearance of an honest game. The shill would jump in with a $40 bet on a different card, and the dealer would turn that card up, collect the shill’s money and push the mark’s $20 back. “Sorry, only one bet per shuffle.”

It always seemed obvious to me who the shills were. They looked like the dealer (both were usually black in the sea of mostly white tourists) and dressed like the dealer, and they seemed utterly unfazed when they lost a twenty or two on what to the onlookers was obviously the wrong card. Even the occasional white shill (a “salt and pepper” team), with scruffy appearance and clothing, looked less like the passers-by and more like the dealer.

One afternoon as I was walking in Times Square, I saw a young man standing at a 3-card-monte table.** He looked like a preppy college kid from central casting – blonde hair, white polo shirt, green cotton cable-knit sweater knotted loosely over his shoulders. He had reached in his pocket and was fingering a $20, about to make a bet. I don’t know why I suddenly felt protective – maybe I didn’t want our tourists to dislike the city – but I moved up just behind him and said quietly, “If it was as easy as it looks, do you think he’d be here?”

The kid said nothing. He watched as the dealer tossed the cards (“the red, you’re ahead, the black’ll set you back”) and when the dealer stopped (“who saw it – just like that”), the kid put his $20 down. Hadn’t he heard me?

The dealer turned over the queen of hearts and put his $20 on top of it. (“I don’t get mad when I lose, I just grin when I win”), and the kid stayed to play again. And again.

Now that, I thought, is a shill.

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* Jay Smooth calls this role the “ringer.” I was brought up to call it the shill. Academic journal write-ups of psych experiments back in the day, the pre-IRB day, referred to them as “confederates of the experimenter.” Makes it sound more legitimate, don’t you think? But the deceptions of those psych profs would have left the 3-card monte guys drooling with envy and eager to learn.

** The “table” was a flattened cardboard box resting on another cardboard box – easily kicked down and left behind if the cops came by.

(The photo is borrowed from Ephemeral New York)

Dictatorships Are People, My Friend*

2011-10-23T06:08:00.010-04:00

October 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

We usually think of a dictatorship as a ship run by dictator – a strongman, a tyrant who has absolute power and can do anything he likes to anyone he doesn’t like. True, but it’s important to remember that dictatorship is not just a matter of personality. It is also a structure. Even a Saddam or a Khaddafi doesn’t do it all by himself. To carry out his directives, he needs other people in other organizations – a coalition of the willing. These usually include the military, but there may also be economic organizations, bureaucracies, and other groups whose strength the “strong man” needs. He has to make sure that they remain willing.

Any dictator worth his salt tries to minimize the power of these groups and to arrogate as much power as he can to himself and his family. Often, that is not possible, and the dictator must allow these others wealth and power in return for their loyalty. But even when it’s all in the family, he has to keep the family happy. Unhappy families are all alike – they can dissolve into conflict and even treachery.

This is one of the messages of The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.

Now, for those who are preoccupied with Wall Street, with its huge salaries and bonuses despite financial failure, Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage , extracts the money quote from The Handbook.

In terms of the political organization of businesses, large publically [sic] traded companies most closely resemble rigged election autocracies. There are typically millions of people – shareholders – with a nominal say in the choice of chief executive. But in reality the decision to retain a leader comes down to the choices of senior executives, board members and possibly a few large institutional investors. No executive lasts long if he does not keep this small group happy, which is why such insiders receive large bonuses and rewards even as the organization fails.

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* Most readers will recognize the allusion in the title of this post. For those who don’t follow the GOP all that closely, the reference is here.

Lessons in Journalism

2011-10-21T18:12:00.000-04:00

October 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ah, the New York Post. Some years ago, I said here that regardless of the actual content of the front page headline, the subtext is almost always the same.

This morning, the Post was playing off the old journalistic cliche: Go for the local angle. While stuffy papers like the Times and the Wall Street Journal reported the death of Khadafy as an international story, the Post nailed the real import of the event for us New Yorkers.

If Your Survey Doesn’t Find What You Want It to Find . . .

2011-10-19T11:21:00.001-04:00

October 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston(Cross posted at Sociological Images)

. . . say that it did.

Doug Schoen is a pollster who wants the Democrats to distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protesters. (Schoen is Mayor Bloomberg’s pollster. He has also worked for Bill Clinton.) In The Wall Street Journal yesterday (here), he reported on a survey done by a researcher at his firm. She interviewed 200 of the protesters in Zucotti Park.

Here is Schoen’s overall take:

What binds a large majority of the protesters together—regardless of age, socioeconomic status or education—is a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas.

I suppose it’s nitpicking to point out that the survey did not ask about SES or education. Even if it had, breaking the 200 respondents down into these categories would give numbers too small for comparison.

More to the point, that “large majority” opposed to free-market capitalism is 4% – eight of the people interviewed. Another eight said they wanted “radical redistribution of wealth.” So at most, 16 people, 8%, mentioned these goals. (The full results of the survey are available here.)

What would you like to see the Occupy Wall Street movement achieve? {Open Ended}
35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
4% Radical redistribution of wealth 5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
7% Direct Democracy
9% Engage & mobilize Progressives
9% Promote a national conversation
11% Break the two-party duopoly
4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system 4% Single payer health care
4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately
8% Not sure

Schoen’s distortion reminded me of this photo that I took on Saturday (it was our semi-annual Sociology New York Walk, and Zucotti Park was our first stop).

The big poster in the foreground, the one that captures your attention, is radical militance – the waif from the “Les Mis” poster turned revolutionary. But the specific points on the sign at the right are conventional liberal policies – the policies of the current Administration.*

There are other ways to misinterpret survey results. Here is Schoen in the WSJ:

Sixty-five percent say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.

Here is the actual question:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: Government has a moral responsibility to guarantee healthcare, college education, and a secure retirement for all.

“No matter the cost” is not in the question. As careful survey researchers know, even slight changes in wording can affect responses. And including or omitting “no matter the cost” is hardly a slight change.

As evidence for the extreme radicalism of the protestors, Schoen says,

By a large margin (77%-22%), they support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans,

Schoen doesn’t bother to mention that this isn’t much different from what you’d find outside Zucotti Park. Recent polls by Pew and Gallup find support for increased taxes on the wealthy ($250,000 or more) at 67%. (Given the small sample size of the Zucotti poll, 67% may be within the margin of error.) Gallup also finds the majorities of two-thirds or more think that banks, large corporations, and lobbyists have too much power.

Thus Occupy Wall Street is a group of engaged progressives who are disillusioned with the capitalist system and have a distinct activist orientation. . . . .Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before.

That means that half the protesters were never politically active until Occupy Wall Street inspired them.

Reading Schoen, you get the impression that these are hard-core activists, old hands at political demonstrations, with Phil Ochs on their iPods and a well-thumbed copy of “The Manifesto” in their pockets. In fact, the protesters were mostly young people with not much political experience who wanted to work within the system (i.e., with the Democratic party) to achieve fairly conventional goals, like keeping the financial industry from driving the economy into a ditch again.

And according to a recent Time survey, more than half of America views them favorably.

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* There were other signs with other messages. In fact, sign-making seemed to be one of the major activities in Zucotti Park. Some of them. like these, did not seem designed to get much play in the media.

Sex, Society, and Spatial Ability

2011-10-18T12:17:00.001-04:00

October 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

It’s the kind of finding to warm the hearts of us liberal, Larry-Summers-hating, gender-egalitarians. Summers – you saw him in “The Social Network” as the Harvard president who had no patience for the Winklevoss twins (he didn’t have much patience for Cornell West either and probably many other things) – suggested that the dearth of women in top science and engineering positions was caused not so much by social forces as by innate sex differences in math ability. (More here and many other places.)

As others were quick to point out, those differences are greater in societies with greater gender inequality. That’s why the math gender gap in the US has become much narrower. In societies with greater equality, like Sweden, Norway, and Israeli kibbutzim, the male-female gap in math disappears.* But even in those societies, males still score higher on spatial reasoning.

I’m sure that evol-psych has some explanation for why male brains evolved to be more adept at spatial reasoning. I’m equally sure that those who favor social explanations can find residual sexism even in Sweden to explain spatial differences. That’s why a field experiment reported last summer is so interesting.

The research team (Moshe Hoffman and colleagues, link to pdf here) tested people from two tribes in northern India – the Karbi and the Khasi. These had once been a single tribe but had split recently – a few hundred years ago. (Recent is a relative term, and we’re talking evolution here.) So they were similar economically (subsistence farming of rice) and genetically.

The Karbi are patrilineal. Only the men own property, and they pass that property to their sons. Males get more education.
Khasi society is matrilineal. Men turn their earnings over to their wives. Only women own property, which is passed along only to daughters. Males and females have similar levels of education.

Researchers went to four villages of each tribe, recruited subjects to solve this puzzle

They offered an additional 20 rupees if the subject could solve the puzzle in 30 seconds or less.

In the patrilineal society, women were much slower to solve the puzzle than were men. But among the matrilineal Khasi, the difference was negligible.

The results are encouraging, at least for those who argue for greater gender equality. But I’m not sure how much weight to give this one study, mostly because of sample size. Is the sample the 1300 villagers who worked the puzzle? Or is it 1 – one inter-tribal comparison?

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* Even a small difference in the means will make for a large difference in who is represented in the tail of the distribution. Imagine two groups with average height a half-inch apart – Group Blue 5' 10", Group Red 5' 10 ½".

Pink shows overlap.

If you’re picking a basketball team randomly (from the pink part of the distribution), you’ll probably wind up with as many Blues as Reds. But if you’re choosing from among those few who are 6' 6" or taller, you’re going to have more Reds.

Summers was arguing not that there was a difference in the means but that the variation was greater among males. That wider distribution as well would make for a preponderance of males in the upper reaches of the scale (and at the lower end).

Ground Zero - The Sacred and the Profane

2011-10-14T11:50:00.000-04:00

October 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

What’s so infuriating about reading David Brooks is that sometimes he gets it right, but then in the next sentence, he’ll veer off in the wrong direction. (Translation: Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I disagree.)

Today (here) Brooks is writing about the rebuilding at Ground Zero and about Chris Ward, who was brought in to organize the whole project when it had become badly bogged down in conflict.

Ward quickly understood his mission: to take a sacred cause and turn it into a building project. That is to say, to demystify it, to see it as it really is and not through the gauze of everybody’s emotions surrounding 9/11.

Ward’s approach, as Brooks says, was to desacralize the mission, and Brooks picks out the detail that epitomizes this change

He changed the name of Freedom Tower to One World Trade Center.

But then Brooks tries to see Ground Zero as just one more example of a more general trend.

Maybe it’s part of living in a postmaterialist economy, but nearly every practical question becomes a values question. . . . Many issues that were once concrete and practical are distorted because they have become symbolic and spiritual.

Tax policy, gun control, and Green Tech, says Brooks, all crumple under the weight of this symbolism. Yes, these issues (he could have added health care to the list) can involve status politics, but it’s not at all clear how much the symbolism affects the actual policies. Besides, Brooks gets the symbolism wrong.*

More important, Brooks closes his copy of Durkheim just when he should be turning to the next page. Brooks ignores the structural problem. The Ground Zero project inevitably comprises two functions – the sacred and the profane.** Like the buildings the terrorists destroyed, the new ones will be places where work, where they carry out the practical business of everyday life – buying and selling, making phone calls, entering and analyzing data. But just because of its location, people will see the new structures as sacred.

Usually, we separate these two realms. We have sacred places and buildings whose only purpose is to enhance some group symbolism. We do not ask our office buildings and schools, stores and shopping malls, streets and parking lots, to express our collective spiritual ideas. Nor do we ask that the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty do something useful like house the Department of Transportation or a Wal-Mart.

It’s hard enough to design a purely sacred monument – look at the controversies over memorials for Flight 93 and the Vietnam War dead. Nor is it easy to design a huge complex of offices, parks, subways, etc. that works. But to create something that carries out both functions to everyone’s satisfaction may be impossible.
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*For example, Brooks says that gun policy is “seen as an assault on or defense of the whole rural lifestyle so to compromise on any front is to court dishonor.” Doesn’t he listen to the gunslingers? They’re not talking about lifestyles and dishonor. They’re talking about their individual freedom and safety.

** Profane in the sense of everyday and practical, not sacrilegious.

Following Steve Jobs

2011-10-13T19:21:00.000-04:00

October 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs wanted John Sculley, then head of marketing for Pepsi, to join Apple. The story and its money quote are legendary. Said Jobs to Sculley:

Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?

Sculley went to Apple.

I think I first heard the story told by Sculley himself, probably on “60 Minutes.” It’s a great line, of course, but there was an overtone I couldn’t quite place, something about it that seemed vaguely familiar that I couldn’t quite place.

I had forgotten about it, but now Kieran Healy has posted a long and perceptive essay “A Sociology of Steve Jobs” on Jobs and charismatic authority. You could assign it, you should assign it, to undergraduates to show them the relevance of Weber and how his ideas can be brilliantly applied to their own world.

But for me, the best part was that Kieran knew, as though it were obvious, the echo in the Sculley quote, and shame on me for not seeing it. The giveaway is the “or come with me” part. It’s Jesus gathering his disciples.

And as He walked by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. Then Jesus said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” (Mark 1: 16-17)

637 New Blog Posts for Fall

2011-10-10T14:35:00.000-04:00

October 10, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Four years ago, I wondered (here) about all those numbers on the covers of women’s magazines. Since then, I have watched as the numbers wax and wane. They never disappeared completely. But for a while, they seemed to fade into disuse, like unfashionable shoes shunted to the back of the closet. But this fall, numbers returned in strength.

What’s up with all the numbers? Of course, there’s no single answer, but I see them as particularly resonant with some themes of American culture – abundance, freedom, success, and self-improvement.

Some of these numbers just tell you that you’re getting a lot for your money. Lucky promises “8,000 Giveaways,” while Vogue and In Style tell you how many pages you’ll get when you plunk down your $4.99 (Vogue wins, by 120 pages). Maybe the publishers think we have a preference for quantity over quality, like those restaurants that advertise “all you can eat.” More is better.

Still, how many new looks can a woman have for the fall? I don’t know, and I’m not even sure what constitutes a new look. But it must be only a small fraction of the 973 offered by Bazaar. And why not round that number to something that doesn’t look like an area code? The reason, I suspect, is that 973 sounds more precise, not just some number someone made up. They actually counted The same logic may explain why hers offers 203 fitness tips rather than 200.

The large numbers (485 new styles, 94 bags and boots, 300 beauty tips) also seem to contradict Barry Schwarz’s idea that too much choice is overwhelming and leaves us in choice-paralysis. Maybe the women who dutifully page through Bazaar’s 973 new looks wind up unable to choose one, and they plod through the fall season in their old look. But what is appealing is not the actual choice; it is the idea of choice, the sense of limitless individual freedom to choose among all these looks.

If the big numbers offer the idea of individual self-transformation, the small numbers, like Bazaar’s 10 key pieces, make it seem more possible. You can really do this, they say. Numbers like Oxygen’s 23 days (for sexy abs) and 21 ways (to live longer) give us a program, a schedule. Their message is success through self-help and self-improvement, like Gatsby’s schedule and “general resolves.”

His list included “Read one improving book or magazine per week.” I doubt that Gatsby had Allure in mind, but they both did think big.

Good Neighbor Policy

2011-10-05T09:01:00.000-04:00

October 5, 2011Posted by Jay Livingston

From Keith Humphreys, in the style of Harper’s Index:

Number of gun shops at or near the 1,970 mile U.S.-Mexico Border: 7,600
Proportion of those gun shops that are on the U.S. side: 100%

And Get Me Rewrite

2011-10-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

October 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The blog Aluation has this fascinating post.

That’s the whole thing – two sentences from two versions of the same news story. And two different by-lines. I don’t know what Colin Moynihan’s official position at the Times is, but Al Baker is the chief of the Times police bureau. Write your own story as to how this change happened.

Aluation’s post just prior to this is a long and informative analysis of the same topic – press coverage of Occupy Wall Street and protests in other countries: “bold political protesters abroad, stupid criminal hippies at home.”

Taxes and Freedom

2011-10-03T15:32:00.000-04:00

October 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Denmark is adding a tax on fatty foods to the already hefty tax burden on their citizens.

In the US, nobody in public life can get away with saying a good word about taxes. Maybe Warren Buffet, but he’s not running for office. The Republican mantra “It’s your money, it’s not the government’s money” has great appeal, and the Republicans and Tea Partistas have clearly stated their preference that government shut down rather than raise taxes to pay for what the government does.

After all, less government equals more freedom. Or does it?

Bruce Bartlett at the Times Economix blog,checked out some of those low-tax countries, nations that are well below the 27% tax-to-GDP ratio of the US. Then he went to the Heritage Foundation site to see how these nations ranked on the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom. Here are the results. (On the Freedom Index, a high score is good. A score above 80 (only six countries) is “free”; a score below 50 is “repressed.”)

(The tax-to-GDP ratio is very slightly different from what you find here, and obviously the score on Libya is from before the fall of Gaddafi.)

Where to go if I couldn’t stay in the US – Chad or Denmark? The freedom of low taxes or the high-tax nanny state? It’s a tough choice, but I think I’d go with Denmark even though language might be a problem. The only Danish I know is prune.

Moneyball

2011-09-30T15:35:00.003-04:00

September 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stanford is a three-touchdown favorite over UCLA tomorrow night. Which is the more desirable team?

If you said Stanford, you’re probably one of those people who thinks that the Big Ten consists of ten schools. You probably also thought that football was all about points on the board – six for a touchdown, three for a field goal, and so on. Silly you.

As the recent (and perhaps continuing) realignment of conferences makes clear, college football is about points, but they are Nielsen points. And on the Nielsen scoreboard, UCLA crushes Stanford.

The graphic is from a Nate Silver article at The New York Times (here). It’s the companion piece to Taylor Branch’s recent article in the Atlantic. Branch gives the sordid details. Nate Silver provides the systematic numbers – fan base and TV market share. What both make clear is that college football is not about good match-ups. It’s about good profits.

The S.E.C.’s interest in Texas A&M becomes easier to understand once you recognize that the Aggies have among the largest fan bases in the country. The fact that Notre Dame’s fans are dispersed throughout the country explains why they’ve been loathe to join a conference. And that the West Coast is less enthusiastic about football than other parts of the country, making the Pacific-12 a harder sale to the television networks, explains why the conference is going to great lengths to expand into football-crazy states like Texas.

Not to go all Marxist here, but by design, the money flows entirely to the networks, to the universities, and to the coaches. The workers who put their bodies on the line get nothing. Actually some of them do get some trinkets and favors, but in the ideal world of the NCAA, they are supposed to get zero dollars. After all, they are not workers. They are scholar-athletes, and they do get scholarships, which are worth something, though it’s questionable whether they get much of an education. But even though they produce substantial amounts of revenue for other people,they are not workers. Running back Kent Waldrep was paralyzed during a game in 1974. When his university stopped paying for his medical bills, he sued for workers’ compensation.

The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football.

The university – ironists take note – was Texas Christian.

HT: My colleague George Martin for calling Silver's article to my attention.

UPDATE, Oct. 2: By game time, UCLA was a 23-point underdogs. Stanford won 45 - 19. No information yet on how many viewers watched the game on TV.

Education Divested

2011-09-28T10:08:00.000-04:00

September 28, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here in New Jersey, as in Wisconsin and elsewhere, the governor has been attacking educators and cutting education budgets, and educators have been doing their best to fight back.

In France too, professors are trying to win public support against the “depouillement” of education. The word literally means stripping or skinning, leaving something bare, and it carries the same connotations as the English “fleecing.” So the profs have posed, depouillé, for a calendar.

The writing on the blackboard carries a message appropriate both to the academic area and to the protest. The double meaning gets lost in a literal translation. “Let’s do economics, not budget-cutting.”

The decreasing function in math is more obvious.

As you might expect, the conservative reaction laments that by doing something that might win public opinion to their side, the profs “dévalorisaient la profession.” Of course, if you really want to “devalue” something, you reduce the money you allocate to it, which is what the government is doing.

View and download all twelve months here, all safe for work. The calendar begins with Septembre 2011, so you’d better hurry.

HT: Maîtresse

Chic Cliques (or is it Chick Clicks?)

2011-09-27T08:34:00.000-04:00

September 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sara Wakefield mentioned on Facebook that Kindergarten Moms’ night was “remarkably like high school where I did okay with all groups but fit in with none.” (I took note because at the time, I was just about to leave for my own high school reunion.)

The social structure of high school, it seems, is all about cliques – freaks and geeks,* jocks and emos, preps, goths, cool kids, et. al. But there’s a paradox here. Whenever I ask students about cliques in high school, they all say pretty much what Sara said. (I mean, that's what they say once they figure out that when I say “clique” – rhymes with “antique” or “unique” – I really mean “click.”) I ask them to jot down a list of the cliques at their school. Some make longer lists, some shorter, but nobody sits there with a blank sheet of paper. Then, when I ask them which they were in, it turns out that nobody was a member of any clique. Instead, like Sara, they affiliated loosely with many of the groups, or they had friends in several different cliques.

But wait a minute. You can’t have a group without members. So if nobody is a member of any clique, then cliques don’t exist. How can everyone see all these cliques when nobody in the school belongs to a clique?

The paradox stems from two different definitions or ways of thinking about cliques – as an actual group, and as a label. When we think about other people, we think of the clique as both – group and label. But when we think about ourselves, we think of the clique primarily as a label. And while we are very willing to apply a label to other people, we resist labeling ourselves.

Attribution theory has a similar take on “personality.” If we are given a list of personality traits – from Affable to Zany – and asked to say whether they apply to some person we know, we have no trouble going through the list and checking Yes or No for each trait. But when asked if those traits apply to us, we balk and go for the column marked “depends on the situation.” As one of the attribution pioneers (Walter Mischel?) put it, apparently a personality is something that other people have.

The same self/other difference shapes our ideas about cliques – that they are something that other people belong to – and for the same reason: the clique label, like the personality trait, is too limiting. To say that I am “introverted” implies that this is how I am. Always. That doesn’t fee right.   For one thing, I know that sometimes I can act in a very outgoing way. And for another, if I assign myself that label, then I can never act effusively and still be true to who I “really” am.

Similarly, to label myself as “one of the cool kids,” flattering though that may seem, limits me to that characteristic –coolness – when in fact I know there are times when I feel very uncool. And besides, I sometimes hang around with kids who are not in the cool group. (I’m using “I” in the hypothetical, generic sense. In reality, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the cool kids.)

The distinction probably even applies to official groups like the football team. If you’re not a member, you might think of them as “the jocks” with all the connotations that the word carries. But I suspect that your local linebacker is more reluctant to apply that label to himself. There’s no doubt that he’s on the team. But he probably doesn’t think of himself as a jock.

So while cliques have a certain reality embodied in real people, they are also cognitive categories that we construct and use to simplify and make sense of the social life of school. Perhaps it’s equally useful to think of cliques not so much as actual groups of people but as ways of being that real people slide into and out of.   And if any of what I’m saying here is accurate, how might it apply outside the high school microcosm – for example, to the concept of social class?

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* At about this same time Sara and I were thinking about high school, Mrs. Castelli’s students – actual high school students – were thinking and blogging about “Freaks and Geeks.”

danah boyd on Bullying asTrue Drama

2011-09-23T09:43:00.001-04:00

September 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Long ago, David Matza contrasted two styles of studying deviance – “corrective” and “appreciative.” The corrective approach is moralistic. It applies a prior set of values and shows how the subject under review fails to measure up. It asks, “Why do these people do these bad things, and how can we get them to stop?” The appreciative approach asks, “How does the world look from the subject’s point of view?”

That was the point of my post about sociologists in Las Vegas. But if you want a better example, read the op-ed (here) on bullying in today’s Times by danah boyd* and Alice Marwick. While most writing and research on bullying falls squarely in the corrective camp, boyd and Marwick actually talk with teenagers and listen to them. A lot. Mostly online.

Given the public interest in cyberbullying, we asked young people about it, only to be continually rebuffed. Teenagers repeatedly told us that bullying was something that happened only in elementary or middle school. “There’s no bullying at this school” was a regular refrain. . . .
While teenagers denounced bullying, they — especially girls — would describe a host of interpersonal conflicts playing out in their lives as “drama.” . . . .

At first, we thought drama was simply an umbrella term, referring to varying forms of bullying, joking around, minor skirmishes between friends, breakups and makeups, and gossip. We thought teenagers viewed bullying as a form of drama. But we realized the two are quite distinct. Drama was not a show for us, but rather a protective mechanism for them.

You should really read the whole article.

boyd has been writing about social media and “drama” for at least five years. Now that she’s in the newspaper of record, maybe her ideas and observations will get the attention they deserve.

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*The Times insists on initial caps, the first time I’ve ever seen her name printed that way.

False Equivalence

2011-09-22T05:59:00.039-04:00

September 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross posted at Sociological Images)

Do Democrats and Republicans have a similar lack of respect for science? Alex Berezow seems to think so. The title of his op-ed in USA Today is “GOP might be anti-science, but so are Democrats.”

I hope that others will point out the false equivalence. For evidence of Democrats’ anti-science, Berezow cites mostly fringe groups like PETA, which objects to scientific research on animals, and fringe issues like vaccination. According to Berezow, many people who oppose vaccination are Democrats. True perhaps, but these positions are held by only a small minority of Democratic voters. And neither of these positions has been espoused by any of the party leaders.*

Compare that to Republican anti-science. Most of the leading GOP presidential hopefuls, now and in the previous election, have voiced their skepticism on evolution and global warming. Only Huntsman and Romney have hinted that they agree with the near–unanimous opinions of scientists in these fields.

Maybe the candidates take these anti-science positions because the people whose votes they want – the GOP faithful – also reject the scientific consensus.

Here are the results of a recent Gallup poll that asked which position “Comes closest to your views.”

God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10 000 years or so
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process

Half of all Republicans think that humans have been around for only 10,000 years.

The Republican base is also much more dubious about global warming than are Democrats.

The graph goes only to 2008, and beliefs about global warming since then Americans’ have become somewhat more skeptical about the issue, but I am certain that Republicans are still well above Democrats on the chart.

As for the anti-vaccine crowd, Berezow sees them as mostly Prius-driving, organic-vegan liberals. Maybe so. I have a scientist friend whose son runs an organic food co-op, and she is furious at his decision not to have his kids (her grandchildren) vaccinated. (FWIW, she drives a Prius.) But is there more systematic evidence of this liberal/anti-vaccine connection? Here’s Berezow’s proof.

a public health official once noted that rates of vaccine non-compliance tend to be higher in places where Whole Foods is popular — and 89% of Whole Foods stores are located in counties that favored Barack Obama in 2008. . . . . With the exception of Alaska, the states with the highest rates of vaccine refusal for kindergarteners are Washington, Vermont and Oregon — three of the most progressive states in the country.

Areas with Whole Foods have both more vaccine skeptics and more Obama voters. The thread of the logic is a bit thin (how big a difference is “tends to be higher”?), and it runs the risk of the ecological fallacy. But it sounded right to me – my friend’s son lives in Vermont – and 75% (three states out of four) is pretty impressive evidence.

But there are 46 other states plus DC, and I wondered if they too followed the pattern. So I looked up the CDC data on the percentages of vaccination refusal for non-medical reasons in each state (here). I also got data on how Democratic the state was – the margin of victory or loss for Obama in 2008.**

Sure enough, the top three – Washington, Vermont, and Oregon – are all on the Obama side of the line, though it’s worth noting that in Washington, vaccine exemption was as common in the conservative eastern part of the state (near Idaho, which also has a high exemption rate and was strongly for McCain) as it was in the more liberal western counties. And of the states with 3% or more taking non-medical exemptions from vaccination, eight were for Obama, four for McCain. But overall, the correlation (r = 0.12) is not overwhelming. And even in the most anti-vaccine, pro-Whole Foods states like Washington and Vermont, nearly 95% of parent s had their kindergartners vaccinated. That’s hardly convincing evidence that Democrats are anti-science. Compare that with the 50% of Republicans (and 75% of their presidential hopefuls) who think evolution is a hoax or at best “just a theory.”

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*Berezow notes that seven Democratic senators (and one Republican) wrote a letter to the FDA “threatening to halt approval of a genetically modified salmon.” But he implies that their position had more to do with money than anti-science. They were from the salmony Northwest, while the company seeking approval is in Massachusetts.

** The CDC had no data for Arizona, Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

Bloggiversary

2011-09-20T13:06:00.000-04:00

September 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Well, says the CarTalk-like voice in my head, it’s happened again – you’ve wasted another perfectly good year blogging. Another 180+ posts. (Five years, 830+ posts in all.) Here’s a selection of ten from this year that I liked. They are not necessarily the most astute or the most sociological; my criteria for choosing them, as nearly as I can tell, were inconsistent and idiosyncratic.

Pleasant Surprises (Oct. 18) The unplanned crossing of paths and cultures that can happen in cities.

Blockheads Oct. 12) Mostly because I’m twitting (no, not tweeting) a Very Big Economist.

The Sneakiest Sneak (Dec. 16) Applied Goffman.

Onward Christian Soldiers   (Nov. 20) No more Medals of Honor for killing.

Mom and ~~Apple Pie~~ Sesame Noodles   (Jan 17) The “Tiger Mom.”

Hard Work and Its Rewards (Jan 24) The work ethic and American values.

Iyengar Management (April 14) Mostly for the pun in the title, but also the similarities and differences in the two video clips.

Overcoming Social Desirability Bias (April 19) Mostly for the G&S parody. The post is about methodology.

Compulsory Fun   April 24 A foreigner sees taken-for-granted, unnoticed aspects of American culture.

That Uncertain Feeling (September 5) My one post that went viral (well, a modified, limited virus), getting mentioned in blogs and tweets by real political scientists and economists. And Andrew Sullivan.

It Didn’t Stay in Vegas

2011-09-19T14:11:00.002-04:00

September 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Everett Hughes cautioned that the worst sin for a sociologist was snobbery. I think he meant not just cultural snobbery, but moral snobbery as well.

The next generation – Becker, Goffman, Gans, and others – similarly showed how our understanding suffers when we turn observation into a primarily moral enterprise. As researchers, especially as ethnographers, we’re better off bracketing our aesthetic and moral judgments.

As has been repeatedly shown in the study of non-literate societies, the awesomeness, distastefulness, and barbarity of a foreign culture can decrease to the degree that the student becomes familiar with the point of view to life that is taken by his subjects. (Goffman, Asylums)

So here’s grad student Colby King back in South Carolina fretting publicly at Everyday Sociology over what happened in Vegas. He’s concerned that his instincts as a sociologist – to become familiar with the point of view of people in Vegas– were politically correct. At the ASA meetings in Las Vegas, Colby went out to talk to people.

I began a conversation with one of the gentlemen wearing a shirt and passing out cards. I asked him about his work, and then when I felt I had established some rapport, I asked him if it would be possible to purchase a shirt like his. He smiled, sat down his cards, reached into a bag, and pulled out a t-shirt that just like the one he was wearing.

Some of my peers have admonished me for this action. They have underscored the point that I could not have done anything to appear more like a privileged white male than to ask a man working on a street corner for the shirt off of his back. I have also realized that by buying the shirt from him I was in some small way endorsing the industry in which he works, thereby furthering in the exploitation of workers like him and the women advertised on the shirt. I even worried about admitting I had purchased the shirt, afraid that such an action would be perceived as unprofessional.

This sort of Puritanism – constant examination of oneself and others for any sign of sin or deviation from correctness – is not likely to endear the researcher to those he or she is studying. (The title of the Las Vegas Sun article – “To the sociologists: If you don’t like Vegas, don’t come back” – succinctly summarizes this reaction. The whole article is worth reading.) Worse, that view often comes at the expense of seeing the reality lived by the people. I think it was Becker who said something like, “We want the people we study to be able to see themselves in what we write about them.”

I wonder how Hughes, the son of a Methodist minister, would have reacted if Colby were his student.

Chart Art - FBI-Style

2011-09-17T11:37:00.002-04:00

September 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

The FBI is teaching its counter-terrorism agents that Islam is an inherently violent religion. So are the followers of Islam. Not just the extremists and radicals, but the mainstream.

There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology. . . .The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.

Wired got hold of the training materials. The Times has more today, including a section of the report that describes Muhammad as “a cult leader for a small inner circle.” (How small? Twelve perhaps?) He also “employed torture to extract information.”*

An FBI PowerPoint slide has a graph with the data to support its assertions.

The graph clearly shows that followers of the Torah and the Bible have gotten progressively less violent since 1400 BC, while followers of the Koran flatline starting around 620 AD and remain just as violent as ever.
Unfortunately, the creators of the chart do not say how they operationalized “violent” and “non-violent.” But since the title of the presentation is “Militancy Considerations,” it might have something to do with military, para-military, and quasi-military violence. When it comes to quantities of death, destruction, and injury, these overwhelm other types of violence.

I must confess that my knowledge of history is sadly wanting, and I was educated before liberals imposed all this global, multicultural nonsense on schools, so I know nothing about wars that might have happened among Muslims during the period in question. What I was taught was that the really big wars, the important wars, the wars that killed the most people, were mostly affairs among followers of the Bible. Some of these were so big that they were called “World Wars” even though followers of the Qur’an had very low levels of participation. Some of these wars lasted quite a long time – thirty years, a hundred years. I was also taught that in the important violence that did involve Muslims – i.e., the Crusades** – it was the followers of the Bible who were doing most of the killing.

Perhaps those with a more knowledge of Muslim militant violence can provide the data.

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* To be fair, the FBI seems to have been innocent of any of the torture that took place during the Bush years. That was all done by the military and the CIA – and by the non-Christian governments to which the Bush administration outsourced the work.

** Followers of the Bible crusading to “take back our city” from a Muslim-led regime may have familiar overtones.

Two Worthwhile Links.

2011-09-15T13:52:00.000-04:00

September 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Call for Philip Morris. Researchers in the UK have done interviews with 5,500 kids (11 - 16) focusing on their attitudes about cigarette marketing. Now Philip Morris is trying to use the Freedom of Information to get all the raw data.

Who do you trust? Why do people accept expertise in the physical sciences, but in the social sciences feel free to form their own opinions? Robin Hanson asked the question. Sean Carroll at Discover answers it. Hanson’s question is about economics, but much of what Carroll says is relevant to sociology. Besides, he includes a clip of the Stand-up Economist.

Home Team Advantage

2011-09-14T13:46:00.000-04:00

September 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you’re looking for an example of the Lake Wobegon effect (“all the children are above average”), you can’t do much better than this one. It’s almost literal.

The survey didn’t ask about the children. It asked about schools – schools in general and your local school. As with “Congress / my Congressional rep,” people rated America’s schools as only so-so. Barely a fifth of respondents gave America’s schools an above-average grade. But when people rated their own local schools, 46% gave B’s and A’s. The effect was even stronger among the affluent (upper tenth of the income distribution for their state) and among teachers.

The findings about the affluent are no surprise, nor are their perceptions skewed. Schools in wealthy neighborhoods really are above average. What’s surprising is that only 47% of the wealthy gave their local schools an above-average grade.

The teachers, though, are presumably a representative sample, yet 64% of their schools are above average. I can think of two explanations for the generosity of the grades they assign their own schools:

Self-enhancement. Teachers have a personal stake in the rating of schools generally. They have an even larger stake in the rating of their own school.
Familiarity. We feel more comfortable with the familiar. (On crime, people feel safer in their own neighborhoods, even the people who live in high-crime neighborhoods.) So we rate familiar things more charitably. For teachers, schools are something they’re very familiar with, especially their local schools.

[Research by Howell, Peterson, and West reported here.
HT: Jonathan Robinson at The Monkey Cage]

The Sweet Smell of “The Help”

2011-09-14T06:20:00.011-04:00

September 14, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

A stirring black-empowerment tale aimed squarely at white auds . . .

So begins Variety’s take on “The Help.”

Really? White auds, yes. But is this movie really about black empowerment?

Years ago, I speculated here that all American films were about success. O.K. not all of them, of course, but many of them – even movies that seem to be about something else. Love and romance, for example. Or race relations.

Variety continues

“The Help” personalizes the civil rights movement through the testimony of domestic servants working in Jackson, Miss., circa 1963. . .

Civil rights? As I’m sure others have pointed out, “The Help” is civil rights lite if at all. It does personalize things. That’s what movies are good at. They’re not so good at showing us larger structures and forces. “The Help” not only reduces political and social issues to the individual level, but even the individuals seem less like real people than like caricatures. It’s all very simple – good guys and bad guys. Or in this case good women and bad women (men in this film are an afterthought). Bad woman really – just one, the mean girl (Hilly). The other white women may be a tad ignorant, but they’re well-intentioned. And the black women are nearly perfect.

As is typical in American films, all conflict is external. Nobody has to face any truly difficult problems or dilemmas that have only imperfect solutions. Right and wrong are simple and clear.* That’s the way we like our movies.

But what “The Help” is really about is success. The central character is the white girl Skeeter, and the story that arches over everything else is her career. The problems and triumphs are the ones she faces in her pursuit of success – landing a job, getting an idea for a book, securing the cooperation of the help, keeping the work a secret, writing the book, meeting her deadline. She plugs away, finishes the book, and sees it become a best-seller. Ultimately she moves on and up to the New York literary world.

It’s The Little Engine The Could chugging through Mississippi, and it requires about the same depth of thought.** If you do see this movie, when you’re done, go watch “Nothing But a Man” (your local library should have a copy) for a grown-up version of the South in the early sixties. It also has a much better soundtrack.

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* A minor sub-plot that takes a few minutes of screen time involves a real moral dilemma faced by Skeeter’s mother. She too turns out just fine.

** The movie does have its virtues. It looks good, and some of the actors are excellent (Viola Davis will probably get an Oscar nomination; maybe Allison Janney too). It was made without big names and without special effects, so it cost a pittance by Hollywood standards. It has brought in $130 million gross and counting, five times its cost, so maybe it will nudge Hollywoods’s blockbuster mentality, and we’ll get more small films.

Cheering for Death - Again

2011-09-13T08:08:00.003-04:00

September 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(In case you thought the cheering for death I referred to in the previous two posts was fluke.)

“Are you saying society should just let him die?” The man in question is hypothetical, the subject of a question Wolf Blitzer put to Rand Paul in the Republican candidates’ Tea Party debate last night – a healthy 30-year old who looks at the probabilities and decides not to pay $200-300 a month for health insurance. But something happens and he winds up in intensive care.

The question is not whether he should have bought insurance – of course he should have. The question is: given that he doesn’t have insurance, should society just let him die.

“No . . .” Paul starts to say. But you know those Republican debate audiences, especially the Tea Party folks. When it comes to righteous death, they’re just so darned irrepressible. Sure enough, a few of them shouted, “Yes.” Go to the video and listen, if you can, to the enthusiasm for letting someone die.

UPDATE: A commenter did not think that the people were “cheereing.” (Either that or he didn't think that “let him die” involved death.) So here's the excerpt:

Cheering for Death

2011-09-11T16:03:00.002-04:00

September 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
About my previous post – the one about Republicans applauding the high number of executions in Texas under Gov. Rick Perry: Despite a New Year’s resolution to reduce the amount of snark I dump into this blog, that crowd reaction did set me off. I wasn’t the only one. Many non-Republicans (and I hope some Republicans too) were surprised if not appalled.

It’s one thing to be in favor of capital punishment. It’s quite another to cheer for it. Imagine a liberal forum where a question begins, “Mayor Bloomberg, in New York last year there were more than 80,000 abortions . . .” and the audience breaks into applause. It wouldn’t happen, of course. Most pro-choice people see abortion, the termination of an unwanted pregnancy, as an unfortunate, regrettable event* – that’s why they also support contraception and sex education since these too can reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and thus reduce the number of abortions. If an audience did applaud high numbers of abortions, we would be right to wonder about the moral compass of those who cheered.

But for those cheering Republicans Wednesday, when it comes to killing the convicted, apparently the more the better. In a way, this conservative enthusiasm for execution is puzzling. The Republicans, let’s remember, are the folks who think that government can’t do anything right. But when it comes to executing people, the government, in Republican eyes, somehow becomes infallible. (In contrast to this belief, the govenrment in death penalty cases is indeed fallible. At least one of those 234 executed, Cameron Todd Willingham, was almost certainly innocent. And the government would have executed several other innocent people had it not been for the efforts of independent groups like the Innocence Project.)

Conservatives rail against government and want to reduce its power – the power to provide education or to protect workers, consumers, and the environment. Yet when it comes to the power to take life – they lead the cheers. That power – the power of legitimate killing – is the greatest government power of all. In fact, execution is a good indicator of repressive government power. Page through history or look around the globe today at the countries that execute the most people; these are not the governments that let freedom ring.

My guess is that underlying the avid support for death is a tendency towards cognitive simplicity.** This simplicity (often euphemized as “moral clarity”), divides the world in two – Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, and most basically Us and Them. That Us/Them distinction explains how support for death penalty squares with “Thou shalt not kill,” for the commandment carries an unstated specification: Thou shalt not kill one of ours. That’s what it meant to the Hebrews of the Bible, and that’s what it means to the Christians of Texas. They too wrap their rationale in a tribal Us-vs.-Them imagery. We are killing Them. For example, to hear Gov. Perry on Wednesday, you would think that only non-Texans commit crimes that warrant execution. “If you come into our state and you kill one of our children . . . you will be executed.” The problem is not Us; it’s all these homicidal outsiders coming into our state.

This is of a piece with a more general view that seems more characteristic of the right than of the left. To be a conservative is to live in a world in which We are under constant threat from Them. Them is the government, especially a distant government like the government of the nation, taking our money and giving it to “those people.” Them is immigrants coming into our country, our neighborhood. Them is non-Christians, and some of Them are trying to impose their Sharia law on Us. Them is the Obama voters who took Our country from Us. And of course Them is the criminals – the ones we have to protect ourselves against by walking around fully armed, the ones we have to show who’s boss by levying the most Draconian punishments. So when we do kill one or two or 234 of Them, that’s something to be cheered.

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* Gloria Steinem used to say that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

** An earlier post on this is here.

Executions and Audiences

2011-09-10T13:06:00.000-04:00

September 10, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When you are executing people, as with any performance, you have to know your audience.

When the Sirjan [Iran] town authorities tried to hang two men convicted of robbery on the morning of Dec. 22, protestors threw stones at the police and members of the court carrying out the execution. . . the protestors also shot at officers with handguns.
Amidst the chaos, the protestors managed to cut down the convicts, who were still alive a minute after the attempted hanging (Story here, but do not go there if you are troubled by pictures and videos of this sort of thing.)

The hangmen misjudged their audience. They could have played to a much more receptive crowd – the Republicans who showed up for the candidates’ debate Wednesday.

Brian Williams began a question to Gov. Rick Perry, “Your state has executed 234 death row inmates more than any other governor in modern times . . .” But before Williams could finish, the Republican faithful, on hearing that number, broke into applause.

Oh my, those Republicans. They sure do love them some executions.* The applause wasn’t thunderous – the deaths under Perry work out to a measly two a month, barely one-tenth of what Iran generates. But Texas currently has more than 300 people on death row. Imagine the Republican audience reaction if Gov. Perry can manage to get most of those 300 executed before the next debate. An O for sure. With 500 executions under his belt next time, not 234, there’s gonna be a lot of love in that room.

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* They also have a curious fondness for torture. See my earlier post here.

New York Sports

2011-09-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

September 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Cities provide all sorts of free amenities and diversions for those who live and visit there. But New York offers free Foosball. Can other cities make that statement? These tables are only a block from Madison Square Garden, so you have a choice: Foosball or the Knicks.

That Uncertain Feeling

2011-09-05T08:36:00.088-04:00

September 5. 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

(A shorter version of this is posted at Sociological Images)

Long before the Freakonomics guys hit the best seller list by casting their economic net in sociological waters, there was Gary Becker. If you want to explain why people (some people) commit crimes or get married and have babies, Becker argued, just assume that people are economically rational. Follow the money and look at the bottom line. You don’t need concepts like culture or socialization, which in any case are vague and hard to measure.*

Becker wrote no best-sellers, but he did win a Nobel. His acceptance speech: “The Economic Way of Looking at Behavior.”

In a Wall Streeet Journal op-ed Friday about the recession, Becker started off Labor Day weekend weighing in on unemployment and the stalled recovery. His explanation: in a word, uncertainty.

These laws [financial regulation, consumer protection] and the continuing calls for additional regulations and taxes have broadened the uncertainty about the economic environment facing businesses and consumers. This uncertainty decreased the incentives to invest in long-lived producer and consumer goods. Particularly discouraged was the creation of small businesses, which are a major source of new hires.

It’s the standard right-wing, anti-government line, and Becker has impeccable conservative credentials, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Still there’s something curious about it. He pushes uncertainty to the front of the line-up and says not a word about the usual economic suspects – sales, costs, customers, demand. It’s all about the psychology of those in small business, their perceptions and feelings of uncertainty, Not only are these vague and hard to measure, but as far as I know, we do not have any real data about them. Becker provides no references. The closest thing I could find was a small business survey from last year, and it showed that people in small business were far more worried about too little demand than about too much regulation.

Compared with Regulation, twice as many cited Sales as the number one problem. (My posts on uncertainty from earlier this summer are here and here.)

Desperate for data, I looked at unemployment rates. Which sectors should be most plagued by uncertainty? I turned to Becker:

political leaders wanted to reformulate antitrust policies away from efficiency, slow the movement by the U.S. toward freer trade, add many additional regulations in the medical-care sector, levy big taxes on energy emissions, and cut opportunities to drill for oil and other fossil fuels.

OK, got it. The financial sector, medical care, and mining/fuel-extraction. That’s where we should find the highest uncertainty, therefore those are the sectors where unemployment should be highest.

And here are the rates as reported in the BLS August report.

The three most uncertain sectors are also the three that are suffering the lowest rates of unemployment.
If financial regulation has Wall Street shaking in its boots with uncertainty, that trepidation doesn’t show up in the employment numbers. As David Weidner writes in the WSJ (here)

The securities industry still employs about 800,000 people nationwide, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. That is only 7.8% fewer than the all-time high, and roughly the same as in 2006, when Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. still roamed the earth.

As for other businesses, with both taxes and interest rates at an all-time low, the time to invest and hire should be now.

[The uncertainty-about-taxes-and-regulation argument] would make more sense if, say, taxes were already high and might be going higher or regulatory burdens were heavy and might be getting heavier. But when taxes are at a 60-year low and the regulations are pretty much the same as they were in the 1990s boom, the argument makes no sense at all. (Mark Thoma quoting an e-mail from Gary Burtless. )

Surely there must be some data showing the importance of uncertainty. This is the US economy, not a Bob Hope movie. I can’t imagine that a Nobelist like Becker would pull unsupported ideas out of the air.

Personal note: As I mentioned in an earlier post, my family is trying to sell a condo in Pittsburgh. We could put more money into fixing the place up – hiring workers to trim the garden, fix the loose tiles, replaster and paint that moldy spot on the wall where the leak was. This hiring would be our own small contribution to economic recovery. But when we’ve discussed it, none of us has ever mentioned uncertainty about Pennsylvania taxes or regulations. Instead, we talk about the demand, specifically the demand for truly elegant, spacious, ideally situated condos in Shadyside.

UPDATE, Sept. 10: A day after I posted this, Greg Ip had much better post on this topic at The Economist.

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* This is an oversimplified version, but it will do for present purposes.

Doubles Down

2011-09-04T14:33:00.000-04:00

September 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I went to the US Open on Friday. I’ve been going every year since back in the days of Forest Hills. I usually try to find a good doubles match. It’s not hard. Doubles has more action – the rapid flurry of volleys back and forth across the net, the ball zipping at a pace that leaves you gasping at how the player can even get a racket on it let alone zing it back to a precise spot.

Stop Making Sense

2011-08-31T21:30:00.000-04:00

August 31, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stephen Moore, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, says that he is “surprised how many students tell me economics is their least favorite subject.” I’m surprised too, surprised that all these students are talking to Moore. As far as I know, he has never held a teaching job. Presumably, they are the students he meets in the WSJ editorial room or at Arthur Laffer’s firm, not exactly a random sample. Whatever. The reason these many students dislike Econ, says Moore, is this:

Too often economic theories defy common sense.

It’s not just students. In the title of the article and the closing line, Moore expands the anti-economics population:

Why Americans Hate Economics

For us sociologists, that’s strange, because we’re told that the trouble with sociology is that “it’s just common sense.”

So students – and (let me be Moorishly grandiose here) Americans – dislike economics because it defies common sense, and they dislike sociology because it confirms common sense. Go figure.

What Moore means by “economics” – the kind that students and Americans hate – is Keynes.

the “invisible hand” of the free enterprise system, first explained in 1776 by Adam Smith, got tossed aside for the new “macroeconomics,” a witchcraft that began to flourish in the 1930s during the rise of Keynes.

Others have criticized Moore’s economics (see here and here for example). It’s the common sense part that interests me. For example, Moore ridicules an Obama spokesman’s defense of unemployment insurance – that it pumps money into the economy, and people use the money to buy stuff they otherwise couldn’t.

But Moore says, “That's a perfect Keynesian answer, and also perfectly nonsensical.”

I’m not sure why. To me, it sounds like common sense. To meet the increased demand, the suppliers buy more materials and hire more workers. It’s all good for the economy. Wasn’t it George Bush who, when the economy got tough, encouraged people to go shopping?

I would think that for many people, it’s that invisible hand that defies common sense – and not just because it requires belief in something that is invisible. The basic idea of classical economics is this: if you set a bunch of greedy suppliers free to pursue their own selfish interests, you’ll wind up with greatest good for greatest number – lots of stuff at low prices. It’s Gordon Gecko’s dictum “Greed is good,” and it may be true. But it is not common sense.

Free market economists (like Robin Hanson) also tell us that getting rid of immigration restrictions will similarly lead to good things.

We economists tend to expect open immigration to increase overall wealth and value (and liberty), and to reduce inequality. . . . Open those borders!

Again, It may be true, but it is not common sense.

Here is Moore again:

“All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” Arthur Laffer reminds us.

Since Moore quotes this favorably (he works for Laffer’s firm), he must believe that it’s common sense. But when I think about, say, the economic problems in the housing market, my common sense tells me that the source of the problem is that people aren’t buying houses. It does not tell me that the problem is builders being impeded from supplying more houses.*

It all makes me wonder if common sense is a useful idea. In these economics examples, common sense is not held in common. What’s common sense to the Keynesians is not common sense to the supply siders.

In either case, if economics were common sense, professors wouldn’t have to spend semesters teaching it.** Teaching common sense – that’s sociology.
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* I myself am trying to sell a condo in Pittsburgh. I encountered no real impediments in supplying this condo to the market. My problem is that I haven’t encountered any buyers.

** I would guess that when you add up the student semester hours, classical free-market economics courses far outnumber Keynesian courses. So I don’t know why Moore seems to think that what’s turning students off is the Keynesian domination of the field

The Morning After

2011-08-28T14:28:00.000-04:00

August 28, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York in 1969, he proposed “Sweet Sunday.” On one Sunday each month, powered vehicles would be banned from the city. No cars, no buses, nothing.

Today, we’re getting a sense of what that would be like. The hurricane has pretty much passed through the city, but subways and buses are still out of service (they were shut down at noon Saturday). A few cabs cruise the streets, but almost no cars. Broadway in the 60s and 70s is usually full of cars, even on Sunday. Not today.

Here is West 72nd looking west from Broadway towards the Park (the famous Gray’s Papaya is at the right).

As a result, the scale of city life has been reduced. People are out, and they walking in their own neighborhoods. The restaurants and shops that are open are the small independents. The large chains – McDonalds, Starbucks, and the like – are closed.

But it’s the non-commercial areas, the parks, that seem to be attracting the most people.

Above is the pier at 70th Street. Of course, in New York, each zip code is its own UN.

Not all were locals. The World Police & Fire Games are in town, and apparently the Hong Kong and Swedish teams are staying in West Side hotels.

The hurricane was exciting, and it did some serious damage, especially outside the city. But the West Side was spared. Somewhere, Norman Mailer is smiling (and maybe sharing a drink with Jane Jacobs.)

Calm Before the Storm

2011-08-27T15:07:00.001-04:00

August 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

With eight hours to go before things get really rough, New York seems to be taking the approaching hurricane in good humor.

The Town Shop, which has been selling women’s undergarments since the 1880s, remained undaunted.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Even the headline writers at the tabloids seemed to be working in tandem.

Fairway never closes – on Christmas and New Years, through heavy snows – closed its doors at 10 a.m. With the subways and buses shutting down at noon, their many, many employees would have no way of getting home.

But the West Side Market stayed open, and people were lined up waiting to get in.

Trader Joe’s closed.

So did most of the national chains – all of the many Starbucks, Staples, etc. But many of the independent cafés and restaurants are open, So is the tiny Westsider Book shop across the street from Barnes & Noble, which is closed.

And if you want to get your shoes repaired during a hurricane, no problem.

The Social Journalist

2011-08-22T09:37:00.000-04:00

August 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Henry Tischler, sociologist and a friend of mine, took this picture at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month – a gathering of hundreds of heavy hitters, many you haven’t heard of , many you have. (No, Henry was not on the program.)

David Brooks (on the right) having breakfast with Alan Greenspan.

When Henry showed me the photo, I thought of what I.F. Stone once said.

Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk.

I.F. Stone was the classic outsider journalist. He had no inside sources. Nobody, Democrat or Republican, was leaking ideas or information to him. Instead, he relied on official government information – documents, Congressional testimony – and on press reports to find out what was really going on.

Stone didn’t have to worry about offending people. He didn’t have to worry about being played by important people in government. He didn’t have to worry that his relationships with the people he wrote about were influencing what he wrote and what he thought.*

David Brooks is a journalist who talks regularly to politicians and FED chairmen. He sees them at dinner parties and at breakfasts in the Rockies. Does that affect how tough he is on them in print? Here’s the opening of a Brooks column of a week ago.

Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular.

But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade.

The rest of the column is about Donald Trump. But Jonathan Chait at The New Republic thinks that this opening is really how Brooks feels about his colleague Paul Krugman. Regardless of who is in that obnoxious “very few people” category (Trump, Krugman, whoever), it seems clear that Brooks counts himself among “most people” – the ones who have to fear offending both their colleagues and those with more power, the ones who can’t afford to be unpopular. (Brooks was at Aspen to talk about his book The Social Animal.)

Does Brooks’s sociability affect how he writes about newsmakers? Guess who wrote the following:

Alan Greenspan continues his efforts to cement his reputation as the worst ex-Fed chairman in history.

(Hint: it’s not Donald Trump. Answer here.)

In fact, the only Brooks mention of Greenspan I could find in a quick Google search was a column suggesting that Greenspan might have had some “misperception,” but hey, as Brooks explains, we all make perceptual errors. You can’t blame a guy for being human.

I haven’t read The Social Animal, but I would expect that Brooks discusses how our perceptions and judgments can be influenced by our social ties to others. Or maybe not.

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* Stone’s independence was a virtue born of necessity. He was a radical, a socialist. In the fifties, amid the anti-communism phobia, nobody in Washington would be seen with him. He could never question them directly. The Sunday morning shows like “Meet the Press” no longer put him on their panels.

Civility and Weaponry

2011-08-20T09:46:00.000-04:00

August 20, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I concluded the previous post be asking for civility from commenters. Instead, I got the all too familiar belligerence (“if you dared to tell the truth,” “Instead of ‘thinking’ why not actually do some research, eh.” “Shoddy research, insinuations and obvious bias.”).

I said I would delete comments that violate common norms of civility. Any maybe I should have done that and moved on. But I’m responding and letting the comment stand ~~just because it’s so fucking stupid~~ because it includes two relevant facts:

The UK has a higher rate of violent crime than does the US
Chicago has a high murder rate because of the many gang-related killings.

These both support the idea that more guns make for more murder.

On the first point: Start from the essential fact that the murder rate in the UK is a fraction of the US murder rate. That might be because the British are just a less violent society. But no. According to the commenter the UK is more violent, not less (I’ll accept his assertion, though I haven’t checked the data). How can Britain be more violent and yet have less murder? The obvious answer is that their violence is not lethal, and it’s not lethal because the weapons they have at hand are less deadly. The British are concerned about knives – knives, not guns – presumably because guns are not so prevalent and hence not so much a problem.

On the second: The Christian Science Monitor quote provided by the commenter says,

Chicago's gang problem is greater than that in either New York City or Los Angeles, according to Philip Cook . . . . 81 percent of [Chicago] homicides in the first seven months of this year were gang-related, which Mr. Cook says confirms his research that despite policing efforts, gun access is flourishing among Chicago’s gangs.

As I said in my original post, US cities, even those with a thinner gang presence than Chicago, have higher murder rates than London. Los Angeles, the city mentioned in contrast to gang-ridden Chicago, has a population half that of London. Yet it had more than four times as many teen murders from guns alone, making its rate of teen murder nearly ten times that of London.

Also, note why, according to Philip Cook, a gang problem makes for higher murder rates:

gun access is flourishing among Chicago's gangs

New York has a lower rate of teen homicide because it has less of a gang problem. Cook’s argument is

Less gangs, less guns
Less guns, less teen homicide

I don’t know why the Second Amendment boys get so annoyed when someone points out that guns are far more powerful and deadly than other weapons. If they weren’t, why would it be so important to preserve the absolute right to have them? Try telling the NRA members that they could just as easily defend themselves and their property, and protect their families if they armed themselves with knives or baseball bats. You would be greeted with anger and derision. And rightly so. The idea is preposterous.

The gunslingers are arguing that guns in the hands of someone with good intentions make it easier for him to achieve good ends (all that defending and protecting). But it’s equally true, probably more so, that guns in the hands of a person with bad intentions make it easier and more likely for him to achieve bad ends. Like murder.

That was my point in the original post. The London chavs and other blokes may be as numerous and vicious as the nasty youths in our cities, maybe more so. But they don’t have guns. Therefore, London has a much lower rate of teen homicide.

Knives Out

2011-08-18T05:04:00.007-04:00

August 17, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The London riots have provided tasty fodder for the “Broken Britain” crowd – the conservatives and right-wing tabloids that have been wringing their hands about the social and moral decay they see in the UK. For them, the riots are a delicious “see I told you so” moment.

A British publication, The Prospect, recently ran a long and calm assessment, and generally concluded that Britain is not broken. But it was this paragraph that caught my attention.

Consider violent youth crime, one of the hot-button issues of recent years. No one doubts that there is a serious problem in some parts of the country. Teenage killings in London have risen from 15 in 2006 to 27 in 2007, and stood at 21 halfway through 2008. But to read the Daily Mail, one of the government’s chief tormentors, is to encounter a Britain apparently on the brink of bloody collapse. Take this lurid piece, from 20th July: “A few nights ago, as an 18-year-old stab victim lay in a pool of blood awaiting his statistical turn to become the 21st teenager to die violently in the streets of London this year, we learned that crime statistics are dropping dramatically. All is well. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, while concerned that ‘knives are still being used,’ is best pleased. As well she might be, for the figures are the creation of none other than the British Crime Survey, itself a creation of Jacqui’s home office. If the British Crime Survey sounds like a vast analytical laboratory stuffed with academics in some ivy-clad university city, that is the whole idea.”* [emphasis added]

Knives?? They’re worried about kids with knives? Indeed they are. The article later mentions, “the fear spread by high-visibility ‘signal’ crimes, like knife crime in London.” And a year ago,The Guardian had an article called, “Can the fight against teenage knife crime be won?”

In America, we worry (some of us do) about kids with guns, serious guns. If we’re old enough, we think with nostalgia of the good old days when the authorities and tabloids were sounding the alarm about teenagers with switchblades and zip guns and greasy hair. Or even a decade or so later, when the scourge was the Saturday Night Special, a handgun whose reliability, accuracy, and deadliness are laughable by today’s standards.

A knife or a 9 mm – does the choice of weapon make a difference? Not if you believe that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” A killer will kill, regardless of the weaponry available. On the other hand, look at the numbers. Twenty-one teen murders in London in the first half of 2008. Suppose the trend continued and London had 40 teen murders for the year. Chicago’s population is less than half that of London; in 2006 it had 150 teen homicides from guns alone (I don’t know how many homicides from knives or other weapons, but it was surely far fewer). Houston, with a population less than one-third of London’s, had 89 gun homicides by teens. (More CDC data here.)

Are our kids so much more bloodthirsty than the London chavs? Or is it that the availability of guns makes teen nastiness more lethal here in the land of the free? New York, with a population about the same as London’s, had “only” 100 teen gun murders – a rate two-and-a-half times that of London but well below that of Chicago, Houston, LA, and other large US cities. I’d like to think that our New York teenagers are three times nicer than youths in those other cities, but I suspect that NYC’s relatively low teen murder rate has much less to do with the general level of teenage civility and propriety in the Big Apple and more to do with the NYPD making it much harder for kids to obtain guns and carry them on the streets.

P.S. A blogger friend once told me that sometimes when he’s feeling lonely and ignored, he’ll put up a post about guns, knowing that it’s sure to bring large numbers of people to his blog. Of course, they are mostly hard core NRA types, and they burst in, many of them, with both barrels blazing. I speak from experience. So a word to you gunslingers and other potential commenters: use your indoor voices; otherwise, I will delete your comment.

* Note how the Daily Mail, in good know-nothing fashion denigrating analysis and research, dismisses the evidence from the British Crime Survey. The BCS is probably most accurate measure of crime in the UK.

Echoes of Everett Hughes on NPR

2011-08-16T08:46:00.005-04:00

August 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

You probably didn’t hear Everett Hughes on “Fresh Air” recently. I did.

Hughes himself, regrettably, was not Terry Gross’s guest. That was Melissa Febos, ex-dominatrix, now English professor. Neither she nor Terry Gross mentioned Hughes by name. But Febos was talking about her work as a dominatrix – a four-year stint she did in her early twenties. (The paperback of her memoir Whip Smart has just been released, and this was a rebroadcast of an interview originally aired when the book first came out.) Much of the show sounded like material for Hughes's course on the sociology of work and professions.

In 1951, Hughes wrote that if you want to study the world of work, you can “learn about doctors by studying plumbers, and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists.”

Sixty years later, Terry Gross said to her ex-dominatrix guest,

This is one of those jobs . . . probably a lot of people in the medical industry have this kind of experience, or maybe even people in sports, too. But you work very, very closely with human bodies in a way that most people don't.

A bit later in the interview there was this exchange:

GROSS: You know, I was thinking for some of the clients, it was probably not unlike going to a doctor or a therapist, in a way, because you've got this secret life, this secret part of you that you can't share with anybody. So you go to a paid professional and reveal it to them, whether that secret thing - I mean, in a doctor's office, that secret thing might be a, you know, a growth or, you know, something happening in a private part of your body.
. . . .
FEBOS: I was actually surprised, after I started working, at how sort of perfunctory a lot of people were about it. It was like their weekly checkup or their weekly session with their therapist, and it was just a built-in part of these men's lives. And to a lot of them, it was just as essential as a checkup with a doctor, or a session with a therapist.

(The full transcript is here.)

As Gross and Febos were talking, I was also hearing Everett Hughes and that bit of wisdom from the opening sentence of “Mistakes at Work.” That topic (mistakes) did not come up in the interview. Too bad.

Class in Canada

2011-08-14T00:11:00.003-04:00

August 14, 2011

I know far too little about Canada – not much more than the information in the Histeria! version of the national anthem, which begins

O Canada
You’re really good at hockey. . .

(Full lyric here. Histeria left out the part about universal affordable health care.)

Here’s another possible difference with the US. It’s from a Paris Review blog post by Misha Glouberman (here).

If you go to Harvard and then you live in New York, no matter what you do, the fact remains that you will have old college friends who are in the top positions in whatever field of endeavor you’re concerned with. If you’re twenty-five, you’ll know people who are getting their first pieces published in The New Yorker. If you’re forty, you’ll know people who are editors of The New Yorker. You will know people who are affiliated with every level of government. And across the board, just everywhere, you will know some people at the top of everything.

But in Canada, if you went to Harvard, it’s just a weird novelty, a strange fact about you, like that you’re a member of Mensa or you have an extra thumb. There’s no Harvard community here. There are equivalent upper-class communities to some degree, like maybe people who went to Upper Canada College prep school, but it’s not even remotely the same thing. I mean, partly there just aren’t the same heights to aspire to. There’s no equivalent to being the editor of The New Yorker in Canada, or being an American movie producer or anything like that. Partly, the advantages of class aren’t as unevenly distributed in general.

I wonder if Glouberman’s perceptions are congruent with more systematic accounts of class in Canada.

(My earlier post on the Harvard brand is here.)

Riots and Social Class

2011-08-12T17:42:00.006-04:00

August 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Just a couple of thoughts about Faye’s post and the largely predictable response.

1. The old college try. A comment on Faye’s post about the London riots asked, “Can you show me a pattern or history of middle class or rich people rioting and looting?”

Well, yes.

I am old enough to remember hearing about the riot at the July 1960 Newport Jazz festival. The rioters were white, middle-class people – mostly college students. Probably, some of them wealthy. (Wealthy people do send their kids to college.)

Newport may have been one of the largest riots by college students (n = 12,000), but it was certainly not an isolated or unusual occurrence. The pattern of spring break riots has been so commonplace that vacation towns have had to weigh the lure of the student generated revenue against the costs and risk of riot. Here’s the LA Times in 1986 reporting on Palm Springs (a town not easily confused with Tottenham):

While Mayor Sonny Bono and other proponents of this year's crackdown pronounced the break the most orderly and successful in years, T-shirt merchants and others catering to the young crowds declared the week a disaster.

Sport too, especially football, has often brought out the inner rioter of college students.

Fierce fighting on the football field and in the streets of this town for two hours was the result this afternoon of the game. Members and followers of both teams were cut by blows from clubs, bricks, canes, and any other weapons that were handy, townsfolk and students joining in the melee.

That’s from the New York Times, November of 1903. But the history of these middle-class and rich people rioting pour le sport has carried on to the present. In the first decade of the current century, we’ve had fairly large riots after games at Tennessee, UMass, The Ohio State, Oregon, Minnesota (hockey), and perhaps others, and smaller ones at other schools.

In other countries, college student riots have an explicitly political agenda, but this is still a pattern, and the rioter-students, even more so than students in the US, are middle-class or rich.

2. Social class and mixed motives. Riots combine practical goal-attainment and irrational exuberance.

Urban riots, as opposed to college riots, are much more likely to start in poor or working-class neighborhoods. These riots usually begin as a collective expression of emotion, usually anger. In London, as in many of the urban riots of the 60s in the US, the immediate cause was the police shooting a person from the neighborhood. But for the youth in these neighborhood, that shooting is only one incident in a long history of unpleasant encounters with the police.

Such shootings do not happen in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods, and in any case, people in those neighborhoods are less likely to have a history of what they feel is ill treatment by the police or a general dissatisfaction with their lot in life.

The comment also asks, “If the rich and middle class were rioting; wouldn't it make sense for them to tear up, burn down and steal in their own neighborhoods?” No. Regardless of your financial position, burning down your own neighborhood does not make sense. It is irrational. The burning and destruction are part of the expressive, emotional side of rioting (anger, excitement, exuberance, etc.).

But riots also have a practical, rational side – getting stuff for nothing. The lure of an easy bargain appeals to middle-class shoppers as well as to the poor. The middle-class might not have the numbers (or the nerve) to start looting in their own neighborhoods. But if the lootable shops – i.e., the ones that other rioters have already broken into – are not too far away, some middle-class people, especially adventurous youth, might well take their chances. Apparently, that’s what happened in London, though, as Faye says, we don’t know (and may never know) the true extent of middle-class representation among the looters. Middle-class people did not, as a comment on Faye’s post suggested they would, announce their financial position by driving their Bentleys into the middle of a riot where cars are being smashed and burned. The toffs may be greedy to the point of lawbreaking, but they’re not a damn fool. (In the 1960s riots in the US, there are documented instances of people driving to the riot zone from other neighborhoods, even the suburbs, to get a good deal on a television or other merchandise.)

The London Riots – How Do We Really See Class?

2011-08-12T11:09:00.005-04:00

August 12, 2011
Posted by Faye Allard

[Note the byline and welcome Faye Allard, my colleague at Montclair and first-time contributor to the SocioBlog. JL]

(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

I am a Londoner. A proud East Londoner, hailing from the working class. And this past week has been one of the most difficult I’ve encountered since I moved to the US nearly ten years ago. This weekend my hometown was attacked by rioters, just minutes away from my family’s homes and businesses, my high school and a million childhood and teenage memories. I don’t think I can do justice describing the feeling of watching this unfold from so far away. Needless to say, I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. Thankfully, it would appear that most of the violence has subsided. In its place: a myriad of social commentaries on why this happened. Not only from journalists, but from the everyman benefiting from the very same social media that helped rioters coordinate. Indeed, many sociologists have aired their ideas on Facebook, blogs and even op-eds.

But perhaps in our rush to explain and apportion blame, we all missed asking some important questions. Why did we assume that the rioters are poor? How do we really know the class background of the rioters? Why did the media depict the rioters as underprivileged? And why did we accept this depiction unquestioningly?

The sociologist in me fantasizes of a post-riot 10-question survey to be distributed to all rioters immediately after completion of law-breaking activities with questions including: what is your average household income, what is your and your parent’s highest level of education, what is your occupation, on a scale of one to ten just how angry with the government are you at this moment, ten being really jolly pissed off?

Short of such a research tool, how did we come up with such sweeping generalizations of a group of people we really know little about, except for the fact that they all rioted?

As someone who has lived in both nations, I feel class is certainly a nuanced thing in Britain, much more so than in the US. But even with the subtleties of the British system you cannot simply see class. And for the most part, all the information we initially had about rioters is what we saw on TV and in still photographs. Case in point:

Spot the posh people?

In this picture we just cannot tell. If you thought you could tell, you’d be guessing, and you’d be basing your decision on ideas you have about the poor. Some might argue that those wearing hoodies are poor, as the wearing of hoodies has become synonymous in the British press with certain low-income groups. But people of all class groups own hoodies. We also cannot surmise that the rioters were from the area they attacked and attempt to extrapolate social class from that location. Police reports indicate that in some cases there was organized traveling to targeted areas. So how do we ascertain the social class of the rioters? Their behavior?

Did we see violence, looting and vandalism, assume that this could only be the work of poor people, and passively accept the media’s categorization of the perpetrators as such? Or are we so blinded by our ideological beliefs – romanticizing the riots to be exactly what Marx warned us of – that we bought this generalization? Or do we want so desperately to blame deep governmental cuts against the poor that we ignore the lack of solid evidence as to who these rioters really are?

I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I know that being from a proud working class background, I am angry that so many of us have jumped to this prejudicial conclusion.

As I write this, on Friday 12th August, long after many of the commentaries have been published and opinions have been shared, news outlets are beginning to report the demographic information of the rioters who have appeared in court (for example, here)

Among those rioters who fit the stereotype – alienated, poor youth – are those who do not fit this type at all. They have already been the subject of several headlines: teachers, an Olympic ambassador, a graphic designer, college graduates and a “millionaire’s daughter.” The very fact that these “unusual suspects” have been singled out by the press demonstrates the power of this prejudice; we are shocked when it isn’t poor people rioting. But why? Maybe it’s because deep down we believe that the poor are capable of violence, but the rich aren’t.

At this point, we are far from really knowing the class backgrounds of the rioters, especially since many people have not, and probably will not, be caught for their actions. We are still without reliable data to draw conclusions, just as we were earlier in the week when so many of us rushed to attribute this rioting to disenfranchised youth. It may well be that these riots were mostly poor people, but my point is, we cannot say with certainty at this point that this is the case. And as an East End girl, I ask: what does it say about us, especially sociologists, that we were so willing to believe this about the poor without any solid data?

A Rain Dance Is Not About Rain

2011-08-11T21:07:00.004-04:00

August 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rick Perry is about to toss his hats into the ring. Perry wears two public hats – politician and preacher – though the millinery styles are so similar, it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. Last Saturday, Perry was preaching at the Christian rally he organized. This Saturday, he’ll officially announce his candidacy for president at a political rally in South Carolina.

A political campaign, of course, is all about winning, presumably in order to carry out effective policy and solve the nation’s problems. A religious rally is all about . . .

Well, according to Gov. Perry, it’s pretty much about the same thing. Here’s what he said when he launched the idea:

Right now, America is in crisis: we have been besieged by financial debt, terrorism, and a multitude of natural disasters. As a nation, we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy.

His supporters echoed this idea of the rally as problem-solving

In a video created for the event, a diverse group of residents recite a litany of ailments afflicting the country, including unemployment, injustice, abuse, terrorism, depression and personal fears, such as addiction, preventing parents from fighting and a young girl asking for her daddy to love her. In response, they say they will lift up our cry to Jesus, through worship. (Quoted in Texas Independent, June 6)

Durkheim had a different take the purpose of a rally. Rallies, whether religious gatherings or pep rallies, are rituals, and regardless of the ostensible objectives, the real goal of a ritual is group solidarity. As Robin Hanson might put it, rain dances are not about rain.

Even the rallyists know this. They judge the pep rally on how much school spirit it generates. If we’re all together in fervent unison, cheering for our side and generating power-plant levels of energy, it’s a great pep rally. If the team goes out the next day and loses 56-3, we don’t judge the pep rally a failure and demand that the cheerleaders be fired. Similarly, if in months or a year or two, we still have high levels of unemployment, injustice, and abuse; if terrorism is still a potent threat; and if the soil of Texas is still parched and cracked form drought; nobody in Perryland will look back and say, “Gee, maybe that rally thing was a waste of time.”

In fact, back in April, Gov. Perry (or is it Rev. Perry), proclaimed “the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.” It would be irrelevant to point out that last month was the second driest July in the recorded history of the Lone Star State.

Irrelevant because, as Durkheim says, the true object of a rally or any ritual is not the economy or climate or terrorism. It’s the group itself. That’s why the generally accepted measure of a rally’s success is how many people show up. Beyond the body count, we also look to estimates of more subjective qualities – unity and emotional arousal; these, too, are properties of the group, not the outside world.

So a good ritual heightens group solidarity. The downside of that effect is that although the ritual increases solidarity within the group, it can be divisive for the society as a whole. Rituals firm up group boundaries. They emphasize the borderline between the group members and everyone else. The Perry rally was a Christian event. To attend was to acknowledge Jesus. It highlighted the line between Christians and non-Christians. Some people criticized Perry for this sectarianism. They argued that the governor was supposed to represent all the people, not just one religion. As if to bear out this criticism, Perry told the assembled, “ Indeed the only thing that you love more [than the US] is the living Christ.”

To appreciate how extraordinary and potentially divisive this statement is imagine an American Muslim leader telling a rally of co-religionists, “We love Islam even more than we lover America.” The people at Fox News would go apoplectic, and thousands of their good Christian viewers would be sending e-mails calling for the execution of these traitors.

The counter-argument is that Perry was acting as a private citizen, not as governor. Maybe so, but that argument might have been more convincing if Perry had taken Durkheim to heart – that is, if he had not promoted his rally as a solution to external economic and political problems. . Or maybe not. A ritual is inherently divisive, though that divisiveness is most clearly visible to those who are not in the group and often remains invisible to the participants. Perhaps the governor of Texas should be a uniter, not a divider.

The Long Side of History

2011-08-09T17:56:00.007-04:00

August 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
(Cross-posted at Sociological Images)

Peter Berger* takes issue with the phrase “on the wrong side of history” (here). Mostly, he takes issue with those who use that phrase. Specifically, he refers to proponents of gay marriage who claim that the Defense of Marriage Act is “on the wrong side of history” (or in Berger’s acronym, OTWSOH) The trouble with this statement, Berger says, is that “we cannot know who or what is on the right side.”

Berger is correct (though he doesn’t offer much explanation) because the history that people are referring to hasn’t happened yet. The history of OTWSOH is the future, and we can’t know the future. However – and here’s where Berger is wrong – we can make a pretty good guess about some things that will happen, at least in the short-run future. We can look at the trend – Americans becoming more accepting of gay marriage – and predict that the trend will continue, especially when we see that the young are more accepting than the old.

But beyond the short-run, who knows? It’s possible that the values, ideas, and even facts that are right today will, decades or centuries from now, be wrong, as in this clip from Woody Allen’s “Sleeper.” Allen, cryonically frozen in 1973, has been awakened 200 years later, and two doctors are discussing his case. (Stop the video at about the 0:50 mark.)

So it may turn out that at some time in the future, people will think that gay marriage is a plague on civilization, that human slavery is a pretty good idea, that Shakespeare was a hack, and that Kevin Federline was a great musician.

The trouble with asking history, “Which side are you on?” is that history doesn’t end. It’s like the possibly true story of Henry Kissinger asking Chou En Lai about the implications of the French Revolution. Said the Chinese premier, “It’s too early to tell.”

At what point can we say, “This is it. Now we know which side history is on”? We can’t, because when we wake up tomorrow, history will still be rolling on. Duncan Watts, in Everything Is Obvious . . . Once You Know the Answer, makes a similar point using the historical film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The two robbers flee the US and go to Bolivia. Good idea? Since we know how the movie ends – that sepia freeze frame – we can safely say, “No, bad idea.”

But if we had stopped the movie twenty minutes earlier, it would have seemed like a good idea. The vindictive lawman and his posse were about to find and kill them. A few minutes later in the film, Bolivia seemed again like a bad idea – it was a miserable place. Then, when their robberies in Bolivia were easy and lucrative, it seemed again like a good idea. And then, they got killed. Butch was 42, Sundance 31.

But history is not a movie. It doesn’t end. So at least for the long run, the OTWSOH argument smacks of arrogance. It says, “We know what will happen, and we know that we are on the right side of history, and those who are not with us are on the wrong side of history.” Arrogant indeed, though not so arrogant as those who claim to know whose side God is on and who say in effect, “We are on God’s side, and those who disagree with us are against God.”

Berger is probably right that OTWSOH “comes more naturally to those on the left,” mostly because that is the side that is pushing for historical change. For some reason, Berger, whose field is sociology of religion, makes no mention of people, mostly those on the right, who claim to be on God’s side.

* Yes, this is the same Peter Berger whose Social Construction of Reality (co-written with Thomas Luckman), published forty-five years ago, has an important place in sociology’s relatively short history.

HT: Gabriel Rossman

Conservatives at the Movies

2011-08-07T17:01:00.002-04:00

August 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the recent conflict over the debt ceiling, the GOP impressed the country with its willingness to tank the economy – and in the process hurt a lot of people – in order to get their way. Their Senate leader likened their strategy to the threats used by hostage takers.

This is consistent with George Haidt’s research on conservative and liberal morality. Liberals, he says, base their morality mostly on two dimensions: Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity. They ask, “Will people get hurt?” and “Is it fair?”

Conservatives add the dimensions of Purity, Authority, and Loyalty. As an illustration, consider the choice of motivational films. House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), was trying to motivate the Tea Party types to join with the rest of the party. So he played a clip from, “The Town.” In that clip, Ben Affleck, who robs things like banks and baseball stadiums and shoots people, says to his friend, “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is. You can never ask me about it later. And we’re gonna hurt some people.” (Complainers about “the liberal press” please note: The Washington Post, which first reported the story, decided to leave out that last line.)

The friend’s only question is whose car to use.

According to the Post,

Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), one of the most outspoken critics of leadership among the 87 freshmen, stood up to speak, according to GOP aides.
“I’m ready to drive the car,” West replied.

The point McCarthy was making with this clip is that loyalty to the group outweighs the harm to others.

Perhaps “The Town” was not the wisest choice. When word got out, Sen Schumer filled in some of the rest of the plot.

In the scene they chose to inspire their House freshmen, one of the crooks gives a pep talk to the other, right before they both put on hockey masks, bludgeon two men with sticks, and shoot a man in the leg!

(Schumer omitted the fact that later in the film, the Affleck character kills someone by shooting off the guy’s penis. What a role model for the GOP.)

In a post nearly four years ago (here), I referred to this morality based on Authority and Loyalty as “Mafia morality,” and I noted its apparent appeal to conservatives. As if to confirm this, the recent Rupert Murdoch Newscorp flap revived the nice detail (from a 2005 Forbes article) that the head of one of its marketing divisions, Paul Carlucci, “once rallied his sales force by showing a film clip from The Untouchables in which Al Capone (played by Robert DeNiro) beats a man to death with a baseball bat.” Capone is emphasizing loyalty, much like the motivational clip Rep. McCarthy used, though the DeNiro/Capone level of cruelty and violence is such that I’m not going to embed it here.

Carlucci left little doubt as to how his ideal motivational strategy fit in the liberal-conservative spectrum.

Mr. Carlucci said that if there were employees uncomfortable with the company’s philosophy — “bed-wetting liberals in particular was the description he used” Mr. Emmel testified — then he could arrange to have those employees “outplaced from the company.” (from The Gothamist)

On a different issue, regulation of banks, the Republicans could have used John Ford’s classic Western, “Stagecoach.” One of the people in the stagecoach is a banker, Henry Gatewood, who has just embezzled $50,000 from his bank. (I don’t know how much the Affleck character netted in his bank robbery – probably less than $50K in 2010 dollars, certainly less in 1880 dollars. As someone said, the best way to rob a bank is to own one.). Gatewood offers his views on financial regulation.

The film is set in 1880, but this has a contemporary ring, just as it did in 1939 when bankers, whose unregulated banks had failed disastrously a few years earlier, were resisting FDR’s proposals on banking regulation
The audio isn’t too clear, so here’s a transcript.

I don’t know what the government is coming to. Instead of protecting businessmen, it pokes its nose into business! Why, they’re even talking now about having bank examiners. As if we bankers don’t know how to run our own banks! Why, at home I have a letter from a popinjay official saying they were going to inspect my books. I have a slogan that should be blazoned on every newspaper in this country: America for the Americans! The government must not interfere with business! Reduce taxes! Our national debt is something shocking. Over one billion dollars a year! What this country needs is a businessman for president!

IRS Data on 2009 Incomes

2011-08-05T05:53:00.002-04:00

August 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The gist of yesterday’s post was that while retailers that serve the rich are doing very well, those that serve the rest of us are not. The obvious reason is that the rest of us aren’t spending money, and we’re not spending it because we don’t have as much of it.

Tax figures from 2009 give some of the bleak details. (But in the comparisons, remember that 2007 was the last good year, the year before the recession.)

(Reuters) - U.S. incomes plummeted again in 2009, with total income down 15.2 percent in real terms since 2007, new tax data showed on Wednesday.
Average income in 2009 fell to $54,283, down $3,516, or 6.1 percent in real terms compared with 2008, the first Internal Revenue Service analysis of 2009 tax returns showed. Compared with 2007, average income was down $8,588 or 13.7 percent.

In various comments on this blog and elsewhere, some people have complained about the many earners who pay no income tax. Now there’s even more of them to complain about.

While the number of people who earned enough income to file a tax return fell, the share of those filing who paid no income tax rose to 41.7 percent of tax returns, up from 36.4 percent in 2009.

The Wall Street Journal has referred to these nonpayers as “lucky duckies.” Here’s how lucky they are:

The average income of those filing but paying no tax was $14,483.

Not all nonpayers are poor, just most of them. But there were some truly lucky duckies, and there were more of them as well.

No income tax was paid by 1,470 of the 235,413 taxpayers earning $1 million or more in 2009, compared with the 959 taxpayers with million-dollar-plus incomes who paid no income taxes in 2007.

There was really bad news, at least for those who believe that’s what’s best for the country is what’s best for the wealthy

The number of Americans reporting incomes of $10 million or more also plunged even more than the steep drop in income for the population as a whole.

Just 8,274 taxpayers reported income of $10 million or more in 2009, down 55 percent from 18,394 in 2007. Compared with 2007, total real income of these top earners in 2009 fell 58.6 percent to $240.1 billion, but average income slipped just 8.1 percent to $29 million.

Things are tough all over. If you want to read the whole grim Reuters story, go here.

HT: Global Sociology

Expensive Shoes, Good News

2011-08-04T10:09:00.005-04:00

August 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Times this morning has a reassuring front-page story – the rich are spending, and prices don’t seem to matter all that much.

“If a designer shoe goes up from $800 to $860, who notices?” said Arnold Aronson, managing director of retail strategies at the consulting firm Kurt Salmon, and the former chairman and chief executive of Saks.

For the record, the negligible increase from $800 to $860 (a 7% increase) is actually larger than the 5% income tax increase Obama proposed on incomes over $250,000 (from 37% to 39%). This 5% increase would have wrought such disaster that Republicans, in the words of one of their leaders,* held the economy hostage to ensure that it would not happen.

Nordstrom has a waiting list for a Chanel sequined tweed coat with a $9,010 price. Neiman Marcus has sold out in almost every size of Christian Louboutin “Bianca” platform pumps, at $775 a pair. Mercedes-Benz said it sold more cars last month in the United States than it had in any July in five years.

Here’s why we should all be cheered up by the good fortune of those with large fortunes.

“This group is key because the top 5 percent of income earners accounts for about one-third of spending, and the top 20 percent accounts for close to 60 percent of spending,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics. “That was key to why we suffered such a bad recession - their spending fell very sharply.”

You might think that the rich account for more spending because they have the bucks. The top 5% that accounts for one-third of spending also accounts for about one-third of income. Now Mark Zandi is a very smart economist, so I’m sure there’s some reason that it’s better for the economy when rich people buy luxury German cars than when the other 95% of us buy the things we buy.

So it’s good that the money is flowing to the top. It’s certainly not flowing to the rest of us.

The success luxury retailers are having in selling $250 Ermenegildo Zegna ties and $2,800 David Yurman pavé rings - the kind encircled with small precious stones - stands in stark contrast to the retailers who cater to more average Americans. [emphasis added]

How about shoes? One of these shoes is the Nieman Marcus $750 Louboutin Bianca mentioned above. The other is a Viviana by Mossimo, available at Target for $29.99

(Click on the image for a view large enough that you can read the writing inside the shoe
and see which one costs 30 times more than the other -- as if you really had to look.)

Apparently, it’s better for one rich woman to buy the Bianca than for twenty-five women of average income to buy the Viviana. But I’m not sure why.

*GOP Senate leader quoted in WaPo: “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” [McConnell] said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming.”

Open-minded or Just Outnumbered?

2011-08-03T10:23:00.003-04:00

August 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Tyler Cowen links to a Financial Times article about Match.com and gives the money quote, which quotes the Match.com engineer:

“Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.

The article provides no data or details, but I wonder whether the Match brains take into account the numbers of liberals and conservatives in the pool. If conservatives are in the minority, it may be simple math that makes them appear more open minded. If they remain closed-minded, compared to their liberal counterparts, they will have less chance of success.

In addition, if the liberal-conservative ratio is way out of balance, even a random matching will make the conservatives seem more open minded. By analogy, suppose that a population is 90% orange and 10% purple. No matter how many orange-purple matches occur, the rate of linking up with someone of a different color will be much higher for the purples. Unless all matches are same-color, the purple minority will seem more “open-minded.”

The Match.com president herself says something that supports this idea that those with fewer kindred spirits wind up becoming more open-minded.

I might come in and say I’m looking for a nice Catholic guy between 30 and 40 who is non-married. But after weeks of looking at people, I might get an e-mail from a guy who has kids, and I might accept that.

Going to Extremes

2011-08-01T08:59:00.005-04:00

August 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a recent post (here), I referred to George Packer’s short essay on the current standoff in Washington. Packer used Max Weber’s distinction between an “ethic of responsibility” and an “ethic of ultimate ends.” Or, in Packer’s words, “between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences.”

Packer said that the Republicans came down on the side of ultimate ends and that they were now extreme in their emphasis on principles regardless of consequences.

A commenter objected to Packer’s choice of words and dismissed his take on conservatives as “caricature.” . But a recent Economist/YouGov poll (here, July 23) suggests that although Packer’s diction may have been undiplomatic, he was essentially correct about the difference between the Republicans and others, a difference that holds not just in Washington but in the electorate generally.

The poll asked.

If you had to choose, would you rather have a congressperson who...
Compromises to get things done
Sticks to his or her principles no matter what

Here are the results.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

No other variables produced such large differences. Region, sex, age, and education yielded differences of at most a few percentage points. There was an 11-point gap between blacks and whites, High income respondents ($100K and up) were 17 points more likely to want compromise than were those with incomes less than $40K. These differences are dwarfed by the 36-point gap between Democrats and Republicans and the 45-point gap between Liberals and Conservatives. It’s also worth noting that the Independent/Moderates were much closer to the those on their left than to those on their right.

Readers of a certain age or readers of history may remember Barry Goldwater, GOP candidate for president in 1964, and his defense of principled “extremism.” Despite the reverence for Reagan that Republicans often proclaim, it’s Goldwater who may be their true guiding star.

Living in the Past/Future

2011-07-30T08:54:00.009-04:00

July 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last night, I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.” This morning I read Gabriel Rossman’s cold critique of an ABC poll that Robin Hanson recently discussed. It was about cryonics. Not so different, really.

Nostalgia is a longing for the past. From that feeling grows a set of ideas and beliefs – that the past was better than the present, more comfortable and comforting. Cryonics feels the same way, but about the future. We are frozen in the present and thawed in some warm, ideal future. (Is there’s a word for this future-nostalgia?)

“Midnight in Paris” is all about nostalgia. It is nostalgia. The main character (Woody Allen in Owen Wilson’s body) is a writer on vacation in Paris with his fiancee. At the stroke of midnight, he is magically transported back to Paris in the 20s. He hangs out with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein reads a draft of the novel he’s working on, he wins the heart of a beauty who has been posing for (and sleeping with) Picasso.

The scenes of Paris of the present are filmed in the very harsh light of day. Paris of the past is Paris at night, dark with romantic lighting. That’s where we want to be.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Cryonics plays on the same idea, but it reverses the time line and replaces romanticism with science. The fantasy is the same – being transported to a much better world – but that world is in the future. There’s a group version of this fantasy – the dream of society setting up shop on some other planet or space station, starting a whole new civilization free from the frustrations of the world we actually live in.

In the end, “Midnight in Paris” suggests that the nostalgia it has been promoting is not only futile but false and impossible even on its own terms. The beautiful model, who lives in the 20s feels nostalgic about the Belle Epoque, and when she manages to travel back to that period – Toulouse, Gauguin, Degas – she find those artists to be nostalgic for the Renaissance.

Come to think of it, Woody Allen gave us a critique of the future-nostalgia fantasy as well – “Sleeper.”