June 12, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
Sometimes it’s hard to be a conservative, supporting a status quo that’s not working, at least not for large numbers of people.
Brad Wilcox’s latest defense-of-marriage op-ed, “One way to end violence against women? Married dads” (here), carried the seeds of its own destruction (or at least deconstruction). It’s not just that Wilcox failed to control for things like age, social class, and time trend. The trouble was that while the article was, on its surface, a sermon on how marriage makes women safer, the subtext was a damning critique of the gender status quo. Wilcox did not make that critique explicit, nor did he intend the article to be a feminist document. Just the opposite: “So, women: if you’re the product of a good marriage, and feel safer as a consequence, lift a glass to dear old dad this Sunday.”
But by pointing out the relative safety of married women, Wilcox was also calling attention to the dangers faced every day by unmarried women. The karaoke track Wilcox wanted was “Stand By Your Man” – clear support for the benefits of marriage. But what he wound up singing was “Stand By Your Man . . . Or Else.”
This focus on threat was not accidental. The op-ed begins with the UC Santa Barbara shootings and the “millions of girls and women [who] have been abused, assaulted, or raped by men, and even more females fear that they will be subject to such an attack.” You could hardly blame his critics for homing in on the “Or Else.”
Wilcox moved on to laud “some other men [who] are more likely to protect women, directly and indirectly, from the threat of male violence: married biological fathers.” [Emphasis in the original.] It’s almost as though in response to Sandy Hook or other school shootings he had written an op-ed extolling the safety of home schooling. It may be true, but “Home school your child . . . or else” ignores the way most parents think about the problem and its possible solutions.
It’s risky to point out dangers and then tell people to seek individual solutions. Urging those on the short end of the stick to keep holding on to it may work, but it may also lead them to the sociological insight that the problems are in the system. In the early years of this blog (here) I used “Stand By Your Man” as an example. National Review had put it among “the 50 greatest conservative rock songs.”* Yet despite the song’s ostensible support for the status quo, it is also telling women what a crummy deal marriage is for them. Imagine a Saudi version that began the same way – “Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman” – and went on to list problems like jealous co-wives, no driving, no going outside alone or clothed in anything but a black tent, and so on.The resounding refrain of “Stand by your man” might ring a bit hollow.
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* The song is not rock; it’s pure country. If you are unfamiliar with this Tammy Wynette classic, you can hear and see her lip-sync it here.
Down These Mean Median Streets
June 11, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
For a quick illustration of the difference between mean and median, I often use the example of income. I choose a plausible average (mean) for the classroom population and review the math. “If Bill Gates walks into the room,” I say, “the average income is now in the billions. The medianhasn’t has hardly moved, but the mean has gone way up.” So has the Gini coefficient.
Here’s a more realistic and global illustration – the net worth of people in the wealthier countries. The US ranks fourth in average worth – $301,000 per person . . .
. . . but the median is far lower – $45,000, 19th out of the twenty nations shown. (The graph is from Credit Suisse via CNN )
The US is a wealthy nation compared with others, but “average” Americans, in the way that term is generally understood, are poorer than their counterparts in other countries.
But as with so many things, most Americans are unaware of how life is lived in other countries. In our ignorance and arrogance, we just know that, although things may not be perfect here, they are in all respects better than anywhere else. As Sen. Marco Rubio put it at the 2012 Republican convention, speaking about Democratic proposals on things like inequality and health care, “These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America.”
The key word, of course, is “threaten.” Affordable health care for all, a higher median net worth – are these a threat? Only in America – or, more accurately, Republican America.
Posted by Jay Livingston
For a quick illustration of the difference between mean and median, I often use the example of income. I choose a plausible average (mean) for the classroom population and review the math. “If Bill Gates walks into the room,” I say, “the average income is now in the billions. The median
Here’s a more realistic and global illustration – the net worth of people in the wealthier countries. The US ranks fourth in average worth – $301,000 per person . . .
. . . but the median is far lower – $45,000, 19th out of the twenty nations shown. (The graph is from Credit Suisse via CNN )
The US is a wealthy nation compared with others, but “average” Americans, in the way that term is generally understood, are poorer than their counterparts in other countries.
But as with so many things, most Americans are unaware of how life is lived in other countries. In our ignorance and arrogance, we just know that, although things may not be perfect here, they are in all respects better than anywhere else. As Sen. Marco Rubio put it at the 2012 Republican convention, speaking about Democratic proposals on things like inequality and health care, “These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America.”
The key word, of course, is “threaten.” Affordable health care for all, a higher median net worth – are these a threat? Only in America – or, more accurately, Republican America.
Marriage and Protection from Violence
June 10, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
This was the original headline in the Post Everything op-ed by Bradley Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson.
Apparently, many outraged readers pointed out the “blame the victim” assumption in the headline. Or as Erin Gloria Ryan, at Jezebel translated it, “Violence Against Women Will End When You Sluts Get Married.”
Others pointed out that the data did not support that claim. Wilcox, the lead author, tweeted.
The new headline wasn’t much better.
Offensive terms like “baby daddy” have been removed, but the idea is the same. And while Wilcox didn’t write those headlines, they do represent his thesis: marriage as protection.
Philip Cohen (here) has looked at the data, which clearly shows the trend Wilcox has been wringing his hands about for a long time: marriage in the US is on the decline. Wilcox would predict that the fall in marriage rates would result in huge increases in violence against wives and girlfriends.
But it hasn’t. In this same period, the data show, “intimate partner violence” has also declined. (Cohen’s analysis requires a bit of statistical sophistication, but his discussion makes the data clear, and his post is well worth reading.)
There are ecological-fallacy problems in the data, as Cohen acknowledges. But such problems have not prevented Wilcox from drawing shaky conclusions about the broad benefits of marriage. Philip even provides a parody version of Wilcox’s strategy, though Cohen uses the data to draw the opposite conclusions about marriage.
Cohen is kidding. Sort of. Underlying the traditional marriage – the one Wilcox takes as the ideal – is a power imbalance. For Wilcox, that’s a good thing. As he says, husband/fathers provide “protection,” both direct and indirect.
But the marriage-as-protection trope reminded me of something Philip Slater wrote forty years ago:
Posted by Jay Livingston
This was the original headline in the Post Everything op-ed by Bradley Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson.
Others pointed out that the data did not support that claim. Wilcox, the lead author, tweeted.
| And, most fundamentally, for the girls and women in their lives, married fathers provide direct protection by watching out for the physical welfare of their wives and daughters, and indirect protection by increasing the odds they live in safe homes and are not exposed to men likely to pose a threat. So, women: if you’re the product of a good marriage, and feel safer as a consequence, lift a glass to dear old dad this Sunday. |
Philip Cohen (here) has looked at the data, which clearly shows the trend Wilcox has been wringing his hands about for a long time: marriage in the US is on the decline. Wilcox would predict that the fall in marriage rates would result in huge increases in violence against wives and girlfriends.
But it hasn’t. In this same period, the data show, “intimate partner violence” has also declined. (Cohen’s analysis requires a bit of statistical sophistication, but his discussion makes the data clear, and his post is well worth reading.)
There are ecological-fallacy problems in the data, as Cohen acknowledges. But such problems have not prevented Wilcox from drawing shaky conclusions about the broad benefits of marriage. Philip even provides a parody version of Wilcox’s strategy, though Cohen uses the data to draw the opposite conclusions about marriage.
| We had reason to believe marriage was harmful, on average . . . as if marriage feeds off itself in a violence loop. . . . The bottom line is that intimate partner violence is much less common in years when marriage is more rare. |
Cohen is kidding. Sort of. Underlying the traditional marriage – the one Wilcox takes as the ideal – is a power imbalance. For Wilcox, that’s a good thing. As he says, husband/fathers provide “protection,” both direct and indirect.
But the marriage-as-protection trope reminded me of something Philip Slater wrote forty years ago:
| In relation to women, men have taken the stance assumed by the warrior-aristocrat toward the peasant: “If you feed me, I will protect you.” Before long, of course, every protection contract becomes a protection racket: “Give me what I want and I will protect you against me. |
Goffman and Veritas
June 9, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
Slate ran an article by L.V. Anderson decrying the tendency of Ivy League graduates to be vague about their educational credentials. Asked where they went to school, they say, “New Haven,” or “Boston,” or “New Jersey.”
Anderson’s course of study, wherever it was, must not have included even a paragraph of Goffman. One of the basic ideas of Presentation of Self is that people seek to control the impressions others make of them, and they do this by controlling the information others get. It’s not about what mythos Ivy Leaguers buy into. It’s about the mythos others have bought.
Ivy Leaguers have a very good notion, usually based on experience, of the impression that “Harvard” or “Yale” creates in others’ minds. Alyssa Metzger in the Chronicle sets the record straight.
Who wants to be seen as an exemplar of a stereotype? And stereotype we do, even those of us who should know better. A few years ago (here) I reported a conversation from my playground days. I had gotten to know another playground dad (weekdays at the playground, the dad sample is a very small n). Brad was a Juilliard grad who was eking out a living as a conductor with a regional orchestra – five concerts a year.
Harvard grads don’t want to lie. So they tell the veritas, just not the whole veritas. Yalies may shade the veritas in order to present themselves in the lux that best fits the situation. But, as Goffman pointed out, that’s what we all do all the time.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Slate ran an article by L.V. Anderson decrying the tendency of Ivy League graduates to be vague about their educational credentials. Asked where they went to school, they say, “New Haven,” or “Boston,” or “New Jersey.”
| If . . . you refuse to tell someone you went to Harvard, that reflects poorly on you – it implies that, on some level, you buy into the overblown mythos of Harvard and the presumption of Ivy League superiority. |
Anderson’s course of study, wherever it was, must not have included even a paragraph of Goffman. One of the basic ideas of Presentation of Self is that people seek to control the impressions others make of them, and they do this by controlling the information others get. It’s not about what mythos Ivy Leaguers buy into. It’s about the mythos others have bought.
Ivy Leaguers have a very good notion, usually based on experience, of the impression that “Harvard” or “Yale” creates in others’ minds. Alyssa Metzger in the Chronicle sets the record straight.
| When I would visit my former local bar in Philly . . . a reply of “In Boston” usually led to them returning to their beers with an “Oh cool … my friend’s sister goes to BU” . . . If I said, “At Harvard,” it tended to lead to them turning on their stools to face me, wide-eyed, with an “Oh wow … you must be really smart.” I wasn’t Allyssa, I was SMART PERSON (TM)— more object than person. |
Who wants to be seen as an exemplar of a stereotype? And stereotype we do, even those of us who should know better. A few years ago (here) I reported a conversation from my playground days. I had gotten to know another playground dad (weekdays at the playground, the dad sample is a very small n). Brad was a Juilliard grad who was eking out a living as a conductor with a regional orchestra – five concerts a year.
| One day we were sitting on the bench, and Brad asked me where I’d gotten my Ph.D. I guess we’d never talked much about higher education. Harvard, I told him. “I didn’t know that,” he said, surprised, “and I’ve known you all this time.” “Don’t be impressed,” I said. “But I am,” he said. From his voice and the look on his face, I could see that he meant it. I wanted to convince him not to be. “Oh Brad,” I said, my voice rising in mock awe, “You went to Juilliard?! You must be this really great and talented musician. Juilliard – wow!” Or something like that. He laughed. “See what I mean?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. Then a pause. “But I’m still impressed.” |
Harvard grads don’t want to lie. So they tell the veritas, just not the whole veritas. Yalies may shade the veritas in order to present themselves in the lux that best fits the situation. But, as Goffman pointed out, that’s what we all do all the time.
The Belmont – No Place Like Place?
June 7, 2014
Posted before post time by Jay Livingston
At Freakonomics Steven Levitt argues for making “a place bet on California Chrome” mostly because the odds to win will be so low.
Levitt is right when he says that the place payout depends on which other horse finishes in the top two. But he’s wrong when he says that you can get a pretty good idea by watching the place pool. The Tote board at the track does show how much money is bet on each horse to win, to place, and to show. The place payout is determined by taking all the losing bets and dividing them up among people who bet on the winner and those who bet on the place horse.
The reason Big Brown paid more to place than to win was that horse who finished second, Macho Again, at 40-1 was the second longest shot in the race. That meant more money in the place pool to be divided (all the money bet on the other ten horses) and fewer people that it would be divided among So if you are betting a heavy favorite to place, you not only have to watch the place pool bets, but you also have to pray that the horses with big money bet on them finish no better than third.
Levitt’s best bet is Commanding Curve to win. The odds will be attractive. A dollar on California Chrome, if he wins, will get you fifty cents; if you bet him to place, you might win only a dime. The morning line on Commanding Curve is 15-1, but I expect it will by lower by post time. Commanding Curve closed six lengths on California Chrome in the final furlong of the Derby, an indication that he might have the stamina for the added quarter-mile of the Belmont. Commanding Curve also skipped the Preakness, giving him an extra two weeks of rest.
My own long shot is Wicked Strong, another possible closer. The morning line is 6-1, but I predict it will be higher. He had some bad racing luck in the Derby and still got fourth.
Finally, I cannot do a post on horse racing without reiterating my pet peeve about the incorrect use of “track record” that has become so widespread (see my earlier post here). In racing, where the term originates, it does not refer to a horse’s past performances. It refers to the record time at that track for a given distance. People don’t have track records, tracks do. The Belmont stakes is a mile and a half. The fastest time for that distance at Belmont – the track record – is 2:24. That’s way fast, and here’s what it looked like.
In a sport where the difference between win and place is usually a fraction of a second, Secretariat is four or five seconds ahead of the rest.
UPDATE: Both Levitt and I were wrong. The winner was Tonalist at 8-1, a horse who had raced only four times and only once against top horses, though he won that one (a grade-2 stakes). The place horse was an even longer shot, Commissioner at 20-1.
Posted before post time by Jay Livingston
At Freakonomics Steven Levitt argues for making “a place bet on California Chrome” mostly because the odds to win will be so low.
| When California Chrome won the Preakness, a $2 bet to win returned $3. A $2 bet to place also returned $3! . . . You can’t know with certainty what the place payout will be ahead of time because it depends on what other horse finishes in the top two, but if you watch the allocation of money in the place pool you can get a pretty good idea. Sometimes crazy things happen. When Big Brown won the Preakness, he paid $2.40 to win, $2.60 to place, and $2.40 to show! |
Levitt is right when he says that the place payout depends on which other horse finishes in the top two. But he’s wrong when he says that you can get a pretty good idea by watching the place pool. The Tote board at the track does show how much money is bet on each horse to win, to place, and to show. The place payout is determined by taking all the losing bets and dividing them up among people who bet on the winner and those who bet on the place horse.
The reason Big Brown paid more to place than to win was that horse who finished second, Macho Again, at 40-1 was the second longest shot in the race. That meant more money in the place pool to be divided (all the money bet on the other ten horses) and fewer people that it would be divided among So if you are betting a heavy favorite to place, you not only have to watch the place pool bets, but you also have to pray that the horses with big money bet on them finish no better than third.
Levitt’s best bet is Commanding Curve to win. The odds will be attractive. A dollar on California Chrome, if he wins, will get you fifty cents; if you bet him to place, you might win only a dime. The morning line on Commanding Curve is 15-1, but I expect it will by lower by post time. Commanding Curve closed six lengths on California Chrome in the final furlong of the Derby, an indication that he might have the stamina for the added quarter-mile of the Belmont. Commanding Curve also skipped the Preakness, giving him an extra two weeks of rest.
My own long shot is Wicked Strong, another possible closer. The morning line is 6-1, but I predict it will be higher. He had some bad racing luck in the Derby and still got fourth.
Finally, I cannot do a post on horse racing without reiterating my pet peeve about the incorrect use of “track record” that has become so widespread (see my earlier post here). In racing, where the term originates, it does not refer to a horse’s past performances. It refers to the record time at that track for a given distance. People don’t have track records, tracks do. The Belmont stakes is a mile and a half. The fastest time for that distance at Belmont – the track record – is 2:24. That’s way fast, and here’s what it looked like.
UPDATE: Both Levitt and I were wrong. The winner was Tonalist at 8-1, a horse who had raced only four times and only once against top horses, though he won that one (a grade-2 stakes). The place horse was an even longer shot, Commissioner at 20-1.
Game, Set, Match.com
June 5, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
Usually, you want to match up with someone at about your level, or a little higher. The trouble is that many people overestimate their own level. Maybe that’s especially true of men.
One summer many years ago at the tennis courts, a guy I didn’t know came over and asked me if I’d like to play. I hadn’t arranged a game with anyone, but I didn’t want to wind up playing some patzer.
“Are you any good?” I asked. He paused.
“Well, I’m not Jimmy Connors,” he said (I told this was many years ago), “but neither are you.”
In chess and other games, serious players have ratings. Give a roomful of possible partners, they can sort through the ratings and find a match with someone at roughly the same level. It’s called assortative mating, though that term usually refers to the other kind of mating, not chess. It’s the basis of the conflict in this poignant scene from “Louie.” (The scene was also played on a recent “Fresh Air” interview with Louis C.K.)
Vanessa is not a ten, neither is Louie. According to principles of assortative mating, the tens will wind up with other tens, the nines with nines, and so on down the attractiveness scale. One problem in the “Louie” scene is that Louie seems to have an inflated view of his own attractiveness. He’s aiming higher than Vanessa. That’s typical. So is the importance that Louie, the man, places on physical attractiveness. This excerpt begins with Louie telling Vanessa that she’s a really beautiful . . . . He can’t bring himself to say “girl”; he was probably going to say “person” or worse, “human being.” In any case, he’s obviously not saying what he thinks.
Or as Dan Ariely and colleagues concluded from their study of HotOrNot members (here)*
Another dating site, OK Cupid, found a similar pattern when they looked at data about who gets messages (here).** They asked their customers to rate profile photos of the opposite sex on a scale of 0 to 5. They then tracked the number of messages for people at each level of attractiveness. The graph below shows what women thought and what they did – that is, how attractive they found men, and who they sent messages to.
Men who were rated 0 or 1 got fewer messages than their proportion in the population. That figures. But even men who were only moderately attractive got more than their share. Generally, the fewer men at a level of attractiveness, the fewer total messages women sent. The male 4s, for example, constituted only 2% of the population, and they got only 4% of all the messages. The Vanessas on OK Cupid are not sending a lot of inquiries to guys who look like George Clooney.
But look at the men.
Men are more generous in their estimates of beauty than are women. But they also ignore the Vanessas of the world (or at least the world of OK Cupid) and flock after the more attractive women, even though there are fewer of those women. Only 15% of the women were rated as a 4, but they received about 26% of the messages. Women rated 5 received messages triple their proportion in the population.
What about those with so-so looks? Women rated as 2s received only about 10% of the messages sent by men. But men at that same level received 25% of the messages women sent. The women seem more realistic.
Vanessa too has no illusions about her own attractiveness. She refers to herself as “a fat girl,” and when Louie, trying to be kind, says, “You’re not fat,” she says: “You know what the meanest thing is you can say to a fat girl? [pause] ‘You’re not fat.’”*** But it’s only when she challenges Louie’s view of his own attractiveness that their relationship starts to change.
She doesn’t explain what she means by “totally match.” It could be their interests or ideas or personalities, but the imaginary stranger looking at them from over there couldn’t know about any of that. What that generalized other could see is that they are at roughly the same place on the assortative mating attractiveness scale.
--------------------------------
* Ariely discusses this research in his book The Upside of Irrationality.
** OK Cupid was founded by Harvard math graduates. On the Website’s blog, they would post graphs like these – big data that could be very useful for the site’s members. A few years ago, they sold out to Match.com, and the data analyses ended.
*** This occurs early in the clip, at about 0:25. The entire 7and a half minutes is worth watching.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Usually, you want to match up with someone at about your level, or a little higher. The trouble is that many people overestimate their own level. Maybe that’s especially true of men.
One summer many years ago at the tennis courts, a guy I didn’t know came over and asked me if I’d like to play. I hadn’t arranged a game with anyone, but I didn’t want to wind up playing some patzer.
“Are you any good?” I asked. He paused.
“Well, I’m not Jimmy Connors,” he said (I told this was many years ago), “but neither are you.”
In chess and other games, serious players have ratings. Give a roomful of possible partners, they can sort through the ratings and find a match with someone at roughly the same level. It’s called assortative mating, though that term usually refers to the other kind of mating, not chess. It’s the basis of the conflict in this poignant scene from “Louie.” (The scene was also played on a recent “Fresh Air” interview with Louis C.K.)
Vanessa is not a ten, neither is Louie. According to principles of assortative mating, the tens will wind up with other tens, the nines with nines, and so on down the attractiveness scale. One problem in the “Louie” scene is that Louie seems to have an inflated view of his own attractiveness. He’s aiming higher than Vanessa. That’s typical. So is the importance that Louie, the man, places on physical attractiveness. This excerpt begins with Louie telling Vanessa that she’s a really beautiful . . . . He can’t bring himself to say “girl”; he was probably going to say “person” or worse, “human being.” In any case, he’s obviously not saying what he thinks.
Or as Dan Ariely and colleagues concluded from their study of HotOrNot members (here)*
| [Men] were significantly more influenced by the consensus physical attractiveness of their potential dates than females were. [Men also] were less affected by how attractive they themselves were . . . In making date choices, males are less influenced by their own rated attractiveness than females are. |
Another dating site, OK Cupid, found a similar pattern when they looked at data about who gets messages (here).** They asked their customers to rate profile photos of the opposite sex on a scale of 0 to 5. They then tracked the number of messages for people at each level of attractiveness. The graph below shows what women thought and what they did – that is, how attractive they found men, and who they sent messages to.
But look at the men.
What about those with so-so looks? Women rated as 2s received only about 10% of the messages sent by men. But men at that same level received 25% of the messages women sent. The women seem more realistic.
Vanessa too has no illusions about her own attractiveness. She refers to herself as “a fat girl,” and when Louie, trying to be kind, says, “You’re not fat,” she says: “You know what the meanest thing is you can say to a fat girl? [pause] ‘You’re not fat.’”*** But it’s only when she challenges Louie’s view of his own attractiveness that their relationship starts to change.
| Y’know if you were standing over there looking at us, you know what you’d see? What? That we totally match. We’re actually a great couple together. |
She doesn’t explain what she means by “totally match.” It could be their interests or ideas or personalities, but the imaginary stranger looking at them from over there couldn’t know about any of that. What that generalized other could see is that they are at roughly the same place on the assortative mating attractiveness scale.
--------------------------------
* Ariely discusses this research in his book The Upside of Irrationality.
** OK Cupid was founded by Harvard math graduates. On the Website’s blog, they would post graphs like these – big data that could be very useful for the site’s members. A few years ago, they sold out to Match.com, and the data analyses ended.
*** This occurs early in the clip, at about 0:25. The entire 7and a half minutes is worth watching.
Tide and Time
June 4, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
Survey questions, even those that seem simple and straightforward, can be tricky and yield incorrect answers. Social desirability can skew the answers to questions about what you would do – “Would you vote for a woman for president. . . .?” and even factual questions about what you did do. “Don’t ask, ‘How many books did you read last year?’‘ said the professor in my undergraduate methods course. “Ask ‘Did you read a book last week?’” There’s no shame in having been too busy to read a book in a seven-day period. Besides, people’s recall will be more accurate. Or will it? Is even a week’s time enough to distort memory?
Leif Nelson (Berkeley, Business School) asked shoppers, “Did you buy laundry detergent the last time you went to the store?” Forty-two percent said yes.
Nelson doesn’t question the 42% figure. He’s interested in something else: the “false consensus effect” – the tendency to think that others are more like us than they really are.
So he asks, “What percentage of shoppers do you think will buy laundry detergent?” and he also asks “Did you buy laundry detergent.” Sure enough, those who said they bought detergent give higher estimates of detergent buying by others. (Nelson’s blog post, with other interesting findings, is here.)
But did 42% of those shoppers really buy detergent last time they were in the store? Andrew Gelman is “stunned” and skeptical. So am I.
The average family does 7-8 washes a week. Let’s round that up to 10. They typically do serious shopping once a week with a few other quick express-lane trips during the week. This 50 oz. jug of Tide will do 32 loads – three week’s of washing.
That means only 33% of customers should have said yes. And that 33% is a very high estimate since most families buy in bulk, especially with items like detergent. Tide also comes in 100-oz. and 150-oz. jugs.
If you prefer powder, how about this 10-lb. box of Cheer? It’s good for 120 loads.
A family should need to buy this one in only one out of 12 trips. Even at double the average washing, that’s six weeks of detergent. The true proportion of shoppers buying detergent should be well below 20%.
Why then do people think they buy detergent so much more frequently? I’m puzzled. Maybe if washing clothes is part of the daily routine, something you’re always doing, buying detergent seems like part of the weekly shopping trip. Still, if we can’t rely on people’s answers about whether they bought detergent, what does that mean for other seemingly innocuous survey questions?
Posted by Jay Livingston
Survey questions, even those that seem simple and straightforward, can be tricky and yield incorrect answers. Social desirability can skew the answers to questions about what you would do – “Would you vote for a woman for president. . . .?” and even factual questions about what you did do. “Don’t ask, ‘How many books did you read last year?’‘ said the professor in my undergraduate methods course. “Ask ‘Did you read a book last week?’” There’s no shame in having been too busy to read a book in a seven-day period. Besides, people’s recall will be more accurate. Or will it? Is even a week’s time enough to distort memory?
Leif Nelson (Berkeley, Business School) asked shoppers, “Did you buy laundry detergent the last time you went to the store?” Forty-two percent said yes.
Nelson doesn’t question the 42% figure. He’s interested in something else: the “false consensus effect” – the tendency to think that others are more like us than they really are.
So he asks, “What percentage of shoppers do you think will buy laundry detergent?” and he also asks “Did you buy laundry detergent.” Sure enough, those who said they bought detergent give higher estimates of detergent buying by others. (Nelson’s blog post, with other interesting findings, is here.)
But did 42% of those shoppers really buy detergent last time they were in the store? Andrew Gelman is “stunned” and skeptical. So am I.
The average family does 7-8 washes a week. Let’s round that up to 10. They typically do serious shopping once a week with a few other quick express-lane trips during the week. This 50 oz. jug of Tide will do 32 loads – three week’s of washing.
That means only 33% of customers should have said yes. And that 33% is a very high estimate since most families buy in bulk, especially with items like detergent. Tide also comes in 100-oz. and 150-oz. jugs.
If you prefer powder, how about this 10-lb. box of Cheer? It’s good for 120 loads.
Why then do people think they buy detergent so much more frequently? I’m puzzled. Maybe if washing clothes is part of the daily routine, something you’re always doing, buying detergent seems like part of the weekly shopping trip. Still, if we can’t rely on people’s answers about whether they bought detergent, what does that mean for other seemingly innocuous survey questions?
Bourgeois False Consciousness
May 28, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
Conservatives get upset when rich people push for policies that will help the poor and the less privileged. But why?
It might be the threat to solidarity. It’s one thing if traditional opponents attack from the outside. But one of our own switching sides adds the insult of rejection to any injury. Besides, the defector’s actions and judgments can’t be dismissed as mere ignorance. He is an insider, he’s been there. So while we treat prisoners of war decently (they were just playing their part in the game), we get really upset at turncoats. Desertion and treason are punishable by death.
In the 1930s, FDR was “a traitor to his class.” In more recent years, the conservative tone in these matters has changed from anger over betrayal to a kind of bemused condescension and questioning of motives as in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” But whether the heretical rich are “traitors” or whether they are “limousine liberals,” the underlying assumption is the same: Rich people should pursue policies that help rich people. They should not make common cause with political movements created by and for the less privileged.
Conservatives here are hauling out the old Marxist concept of “false consciousness” and applying it to the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat. If these wealthy people had true class consciousness, they would remain true to rich people’s movements.
The latest version of this reaction came yesterday in an NPR story about a meeting in London, a meeting of the very, very, very rich – 250 invited guests (including Prince Charles) – to talk about “inclusive capitalism.” Among things such capitalism might include are attention to the environment, to inequality, and to working conditions.
It’s hard for conservatives to blatantly oppose those goals. Instead, their strategy is to belittle. The NPR story asked Scott Winship for his reaction. Winship, works for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank (they get their money from Koch, Scaife, et al.). Winship’s statements are usually sensible and data based, but his contribution to the NPR story is just snark.
Winship’s guiding principle here seems to be: If you can’t say something nasty, don’t say anything at all. Since he can’t demean the goals, he dismisses the participants’ motives (they are insecure egotists who want to be patted on the back) and says that for a bunch of investors, they’re making bad investment decisions – investing all that effort to get very little return.* Apparently, it’s better to do nothing than to try to ameliorate real problems.
Better still to devote that effort to making themselves still richer. At least that way, they’ll have conservatives patting them on the back and thanking them for being “job creators.”
-------------------------
*Maybe the NPR interviewer had prompted Winship to be critical. Maybe Winship made more substantive comments that were edited out of the piece. I certainly hope so.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Conservatives get upset when rich people push for policies that will help the poor and the less privileged. But why?
It might be the threat to solidarity. It’s one thing if traditional opponents attack from the outside. But one of our own switching sides adds the insult of rejection to any injury. Besides, the defector’s actions and judgments can’t be dismissed as mere ignorance. He is an insider, he’s been there. So while we treat prisoners of war decently (they were just playing their part in the game), we get really upset at turncoats. Desertion and treason are punishable by death.
In the 1930s, FDR was “a traitor to his class.” In more recent years, the conservative tone in these matters has changed from anger over betrayal to a kind of bemused condescension and questioning of motives as in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” But whether the heretical rich are “traitors” or whether they are “limousine liberals,” the underlying assumption is the same: Rich people should pursue policies that help rich people. They should not make common cause with political movements created by and for the less privileged.
Conservatives here are hauling out the old Marxist concept of “false consciousness” and applying it to the bourgeoisie rather than the proletariat. If these wealthy people had true class consciousness, they would remain true to rich people’s movements.
The latest version of this reaction came yesterday in an NPR story about a meeting in London, a meeting of the very, very, very rich – 250 invited guests (including Prince Charles) – to talk about “inclusive capitalism.” Among things such capitalism might include are attention to the environment, to inequality, and to working conditions.
| LYNN FORESTER DE ROTHSCHILD: We have $30 trillion of assets under management in the room. So if this bulk of capital decides that they are going to invest in companies that aren't only thinking about the short-term profit, then we will see corporate behavior change. |
It’s hard for conservatives to blatantly oppose those goals. Instead, their strategy is to belittle. The NPR story asked Scott Winship for his reaction. Winship, works for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank (they get their money from Koch, Scaife, et al.). Winship’s statements are usually sensible and data based, but his contribution to the NPR story is just snark.
| SCOTT WINSHIP: I suspect the return on investment in this conference is astonishingly low. It sort of surprises me, I think, that you have a bunch of people in the investment community who apparently are viewing this as having a significant return on investment, in some way, whether the return is in people kind of patting them on the back and saying, thanks for caring about us, or in actual changes to policies. |
Winship’s guiding principle here seems to be: If you can’t say something nasty, don’t say anything at all. Since he can’t demean the goals, he dismisses the participants’ motives (they are insecure egotists who want to be patted on the back) and says that for a bunch of investors, they’re making bad investment decisions – investing all that effort to get very little return.* Apparently, it’s better to do nothing than to try to ameliorate real problems.
Better still to devote that effort to making themselves still richer. At least that way, they’ll have conservatives patting them on the back and thanking them for being “job creators.”
-------------------------
*Maybe the NPR interviewer had prompted Winship to be critical. Maybe Winship made more substantive comments that were edited out of the piece. I certainly hope so.
Sell It! – American (Psychology) Hustle
May 23, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
The Rangers crushed the Canadiens convincingly in game one: 7-2. The question was whether that result could be replicated . . . three more times.
Replication is hard (as the Rangers and their fans discovered in overtime at the Garden last night). That’s true in social science too. The difference is that the results of the Rangers’ failure to replicate were published.
Social psychologists are now paying more attention to the replication question. In the Reproducibility Project, Brian Nosek and others have set about trying to replicate most of the studies published in three top journals since 2008. The first round of results was encouraging – of thirteen attempts, ten were consistent with the original findings. In one case, an “anchoring” study by Daniel Kahneman, the effect was stronger than in the original.
What failed to replicate? Mostly, experiments involving “priming,” where subliminal cues affect people’s ideas or behavior. In the best known and now most controversial of these, participants were primed by words suggesting old age (wrinkles, bingo, alone, Florida). They were then surreptitiously timed as they walked down the hall. In the original study by John Bargh (the priming primus inter pares), participants who were primed walked more slowly than did the controls.*
Many people have tried to replicate this study, and the results are mixed. One problem might be a “Rosenthal” effect, where the experimenters unintentionally and unknowingly influence the participants’ behavior so that it conforms with their expectations. Double-blind experiments, where the experimenters don’t know which participants have been primed, do not produce significant differences. (More here.)
I had a different explanation: some guys can prime; some can’t.
Maybe John Bargh and his assistants are really good at priming. Somehow, when they give participants those words mixed in among others, the subjects get a strong but still subliminal mental image of wrinkled retirees in Miami. But other psychologists at other labs haven’t got the same touch. Unfortunately, the researchers did not use an independent measure of how effective the priming was, so we can’t know.
I was delighted to see that Daniel Kahneman (quoted here ) had the same idea.
Many social psychology experiments involve a manipulation that the participant must be unaware of. If the person catches on to the priming (“Hey, all these sentences have words with a geezer theme,”), it blows the con. Some experiments require more blatant deceptions (think Milgram), and not all psychologists are good deceivers.
What reminded me of this was Eliot Aronson’s memoir Not by Chance Alone. Aronson is one of the godfathers of social psychology experiments, and one of his most famous is the one-dollar-twenty-dollar lie, more widely known as “Aronson and Carlsmith, 1963.” Carlsmith was J. Merrill Carlsmith. The name seems like something from central casting, and so did the man – a polite WASP who prepped at Andover, etc.
In the experiment, the subject was given a boring task to do – taking spools out of a rack and then putting them back, again and again, while Carlsmith as experimenter stood there with a stopwatch pretending to time him. The next step was to convince the subject to help the experimenter.
But Carlsmith could not do a credible job. Subjects immediately became suspicious.
Posted by Jay Livingston
The Rangers crushed the Canadiens convincingly in game one: 7-2. The question was whether that result could be replicated . . . three more times.
Replication is hard (as the Rangers and their fans discovered in overtime at the Garden last night). That’s true in social science too. The difference is that the results of the Rangers’ failure to replicate were published. Social psychologists are now paying more attention to the replication question. In the Reproducibility Project, Brian Nosek and others have set about trying to replicate most of the studies published in three top journals since 2008. The first round of results was encouraging – of thirteen attempts, ten were consistent with the original findings. In one case, an “anchoring” study by Daniel Kahneman, the effect was stronger than in the original.
What failed to replicate? Mostly, experiments involving “priming,” where subliminal cues affect people’s ideas or behavior. In the best known and now most controversial of these, participants were primed by words suggesting old age (wrinkles, bingo, alone, Florida). They were then surreptitiously timed as they walked down the hall. In the original study by John Bargh (the priming primus inter pares), participants who were primed walked more slowly than did the controls.*
Many people have tried to replicate this study, and the results are mixed. One problem might be a “Rosenthal” effect, where the experimenters unintentionally and unknowingly influence the participants’ behavior so that it conforms with their expectations. Double-blind experiments, where the experimenters don’t know which participants have been primed, do not produce significant differences. (More here.)
I had a different explanation: some guys can prime; some can’t.
Maybe John Bargh and his assistants are really good at priming. Somehow, when they give participants those words mixed in among others, the subjects get a strong but still subliminal mental image of wrinkled retirees in Miami. But other psychologists at other labs haven’t got the same touch. Unfortunately, the researchers did not use an independent measure of how effective the priming was, so we can’t know.
I was delighted to see that Daniel Kahneman (quoted here ) had the same idea.
| The conduct of subtle experiments has much in common with the direction of a theatre performance . . . you must tweak the situation just so, to make the manipulation strong enough to work, but not salient enough to attract even a little attention . . . .Bargh has a knack that not all of us have. |
Many social psychology experiments involve a manipulation that the participant must be unaware of. If the person catches on to the priming (“Hey, all these sentences have words with a geezer theme,”), it blows the con. Some experiments require more blatant deceptions (think Milgram), and not all psychologists are good deceivers.
What reminded me of this was Eliot Aronson’s memoir Not by Chance Alone. Aronson is one of the godfathers of social psychology experiments, and one of his most famous is the one-dollar-twenty-dollar lie, more widely known as “Aronson and Carlsmith, 1963.” Carlsmith was J. Merrill Carlsmith. The name seems like something from central casting, and so did the man – a polite WASP who prepped at Andover, etc.
In the experiment, the subject was given a boring task to do – taking spools out of a rack and then putting them back, again and again, while Carlsmith as experimenter stood there with a stopwatch pretending to time him. The next step was to convince the subject to help the experimenter.
| [Merrill] would explain that he was testing the hypothesis that people work faster if they are told in advance that the task is incredibly interesting than if they are told nothing and informed, “You were in the control condition. That is why you were told nothing.” At this point Merrill would say that the guy who was supposed to give the ecstatic description to the next subject had just phoned in to say he couldn’t make it. Merrill would beg the “control” subject to do him a favor and play the role, offering him a dollar (or twenty dollars) to do it. Once the subject agreed, Merrill was to give him the money and a sheet listing the main things to say praising the experiment and leave him alone for a few minutes to prepare. |
But Carlsmith could not do a credible job. Subjects immediately became suspicious.
| It was crystal clear why the subjects weren’t buying it: He wasn’t selling it. Leon [Festinger] said to me, “Train him.” |
Sell it. If you’ve seen “American Hustle,” you might remember the scene where Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) is trying to show the FBI agent disguised as an Arab prince how to give a gift to the politician they are setting up. (The relevant part starts at 0:12 and ends at about 0:38)
Here is the script:
Here is the script:
Aronson had to do something similar, and he had the qualifications. As a teenager, he had worked at a Fascination booth on the boardwalk in Revere, Massachusetts, reeling off a spiel to draw strollers in to try their luck.
| Walk right in, sit in, get a seat, get a ball. Play poker for a nickel. . . You get five rubber balls. You roll them nice and easy . . . Any three of a kind or better poker hand, and you are a winner. So walk in, sit in, play poker for a nickel. Five cents. Hey! There's three jacks on table number 27. Payoff that lucky winner! |
Twenty years later, Aronson still had the knack, and he could impart it to others. Like Kahneman, he thinks of the experiment as theater.
| I gave Merrill a crash course in acting. “You don’t simply say that the assistant hasn’t shown up,” I said. “You fidget, you sweat, you pace up and down, you wring your hands, you convey to the subject that you are in real trouble here. And then, you act as if you just now got an idea. You look at the subject, and you brighten up. ‘You! You can do this for me. I can even pay you.’” |
The deception worked, and the experiment worked. When asked to say how interesting the task was, the $1 subjects give it higher ratings than did the $20 subjects. Less pay for lying, more attitude shift. The experiment is now part of the cognitive dissonance canon. Surely, others have tried to replicate it. I just don’t know what the results have been.
--------------------
* An earlier post on Bargh and replication is here
.
Health Execs – Doing Well by Doing Well by Well-Point
May 18, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
When my primary care physician, a wonderful doctor, told me he was retiring, he said, “I just can’t practice medicine anymore the way I want to.” It wasn’t the government or malpractice lawyers. It was the insurance companies.
This was long before Obamacare. It was back when President W was telling us that “America has the best health care system in the world”; back when “the best” meant spending twice as much as other developed countries and getting health outcomes that were no better and by some measures worse. (That’s still true).
Many critics then blamed the insurance companies, whose administrative costs were so much higher than those of public health care, including our own Medicare. Some of that money went to employees whose job it was to increase insurers’ profits by not paying claims. Back then we learned the word “rescission” – finding a pretext for cancelling the coverage of people whose medical bills were too high. Insurance company executives, summoned to Congressional hearings, stood their ground and offered some misleading statistics.
None of the Congressional representatives on the committee asked the execs how much they were getting paid. Maybe they should have.
Health care in the US is a $2.7 trillion dollar business, and today’s Times has an article about who’s getting the big bucks. Not the doctors, it turns out. And certainly not the people who have the most contact with sick people - nurses, EMTs, and those further down the chain. Here’s the chart from the article, with an inset showing those administrative costs.
As fine print at the top of the chart says, these are just salaries - walking-around money an exec gets for showing up. The real money is in the options and incentives.
Even the doctors now sense that they too are merely working for The Man.
-----------------------------------
* Northern Wisconsin includes three blue counties (they voted to recall Gov. Walker). The doctors, like the majority of citizens there, may have been contaminated by their proximity to liberal places like Minnesota and Canada.
Posted by Jay Livingston
When my primary care physician, a wonderful doctor, told me he was retiring, he said, “I just can’t practice medicine anymore the way I want to.” It wasn’t the government or malpractice lawyers. It was the insurance companies.
This was long before Obamacare. It was back when President W was telling us that “America has the best health care system in the world”; back when “the best” meant spending twice as much as other developed countries and getting health outcomes that were no better and by some measures worse. (That’s still true).
Many critics then blamed the insurance companies, whose administrative costs were so much higher than those of public health care, including our own Medicare. Some of that money went to employees whose job it was to increase insurers’ profits by not paying claims. Back then we learned the word “rescission” – finding a pretext for cancelling the coverage of people whose medical bills were too high. Insurance company executives, summoned to Congressional hearings, stood their ground and offered some misleading statistics.
None of the Congressional representatives on the committee asked the execs how much they were getting paid. Maybe they should have.
Health care in the US is a $2.7 trillion dollar business, and today’s Times has an article about who’s getting the big bucks. Not the doctors, it turns out. And certainly not the people who have the most contact with sick people - nurses, EMTs, and those further down the chain. Here’s the chart from the article, with an inset showing those administrative costs.
(Click on the chart for a larger view.)
As fine print at the top of the chart says, these are just salaries - walking-around money an exec gets for showing up. The real money is in the options and incentives.
In a deal that is not unusual in the industry, Mark T. Bertolini, the chief executive of Aetna, earned a salary of about $977,000 in 2012 but a total compensation package of over $36 million, the bulk of it from stocks vested and options he exercised that year.I’m sure that there is some free-market explanation for these payment inequalities, and that all is for the best in this best of all possible health care systems. The anti-Obamacare rhetoric has railed against a “government takeover” of medicine. It is, of course, no such thing. Obama had to remove the “public option”; Republicans prevented the government from fielding a team and getting into the game. Instead, we have had an insurance company takeover of medicine. It’s not the government that’s coming between doctor and patient, it’s the insurance companies. Those dreaded “bureaucrats” aren’t working for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They’ve working for Aetna and Well-Point.
Even the doctors now sense that they too are merely working for The Man.
Doctors are beginning to push back: Last month, 75 doctors in northern Wisconsin* [demanded] . . . health reforms . . . requiring that 95 percent of insurance premiums be used on medical care. The movement was ignited when a surgeon, Dr. Hans Rechsteiner, discovered that a brief outpatient appendectomy he had performed for a fee of $1,700 generated over $12,000 in hospital bills, including $6,500 for operating room and recovery room charges.That $12,000 tab is slightly under the US average. (For more on appendectomy costs, and especially if you remember Madeline, see this earlier post – here.)
-----------------------------------
* Northern Wisconsin includes three blue counties (they voted to recall Gov. Walker). The doctors, like the majority of citizens there, may have been contaminated by their proximity to liberal places like Minnesota and Canada.
Durkheim at Commencement
May 16, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
All these commencement speakers withdrawing because of student protests. Condoleezza Rice is the best-known, but in his Times op-ed today (here), Timothy Egan mentions several others. The title on Egan’s piece is “The Commencement Bigots,” but Egan’s name-calling doesn’t end at “bigots.” There’s “fragile,” (overly) “sensitive,” “strong-arm tactics,” “bully,” and “pressure tactics designed to kill opposing views.” That last one is a bit long for playground shouting, but I guess “poopyheads” wouldn’t pass the Times stylesheet, though “kill” is a nice touch.
Egan concludes:
Durkheim would have had so much to contribute to this discussion, but alas, he has not been invited to speak.
Commencement is a ritual. It takes place in the realm of the sacred, apart from the everyday, “profane” world of getting and spending, of debating and politicking. In the sacred world, we emphasize unity, solidarity, and similarity. That’s the symbolism of the event. No individual fashion statements, just everyone wearing the same plain caps and gowns. The stadium or auditorium or whatever is festooned with the school colors, the colors that represent all of us. The message is that we’re all here together, members of the Our Uni* community. There’s a time and place for provocative, challenging, and divisive speeches, preferably a setting where people can respond and ask questions. Graduation ain’t it.
We accept this restriction at other rituals. At a funeral, we do not want the eulogist to challenge our positive views of the deceased. At a wedding, surely there are reasons to worry about fault lines in the terrain the couple is standing on, but we don’t want the best man, in his toast, to point out any inconvenient truths.
Read Egan’s column and note the speakers he selects as some of the best from the recent past – Steve Jobs, David Foster Wallace, Stephen Colbert. None of these, to judge by the key quotes Egan selects, had a political edge or promoted one side of a controversial issue. They all offered something that the seniors could admire together, ponder philosophically together, or laugh at together.
Since rituals are about group solidarity and the symbolism of unity, what the speaker says may be less important than who the speaker is. The university is not just asking someone to make a good speech; it is bestowing an honor. The question is not whether the person should be heard, it’s whether the university should honor that person on behalf of the entire community. As Egan says,
For our graduation speaker this year, the administration chose author James Patterson.
I have heard some grumbling, especially among faculty in the English department. Their complaints have nothing to do with what Patterson might say. Instead, they are concerned that the school is honoring a writer whose presence would never grace their syllabi. (On a campus discussion forum, one contributor referred to him only as Paperback Writer.)
Of course, there are worse things for graduation than a divisive speaker or an airport paperback author. Egan mentions “broiling sun.” Cold and rain, our fate last year, can be just as bad.
------------------------------------
* In My Freshman Year, Rebekah Nathan (aka Cathy Small) gives her school the pseudonym Any U, echoing its true identity, NAU (Northern Arizona University). My favorite made-up name for a generic school comes from Montclair prof David Galef: U of All People.
Posted by Jay Livingston
All these commencement speakers withdrawing because of student protests. Condoleezza Rice is the best-known, but in his Times op-ed today (here), Timothy Egan mentions several others. The title on Egan’s piece is “The Commencement Bigots,” but Egan’s name-calling doesn’t end at “bigots.” There’s “fragile,” (overly) “sensitive,” “strong-arm tactics,” “bully,” and “pressure tactics designed to kill opposing views.” That last one is a bit long for playground shouting, but I guess “poopyheads” wouldn’t pass the Times stylesheet, though “kill” is a nice touch.
Egan concludes:
the lefty thought police at Smith, Haverford and Rutgers share one thing with the knuckle-dragging hard right in Oklahoma: They’re afraid of hearing something that might spoil a view of the world they’ve already figured out.Other commentators take the “I’m rubber and you’re glue” approach saying that it’s the speakers who are the cowards. They’re the ones who chickened out. As Egan says, almost in contradiction to his argument about who it is that’s afraid, Rice “canceled after a small knot of protesters pressured the university.” Brave Condi, who stood up to Saddam and other brutal tyrants, unwilling to speak to an audience that might have small knot of protesters.
Durkheim would have had so much to contribute to this discussion, but alas, he has not been invited to speak.
We accept this restriction at other rituals. At a funeral, we do not want the eulogist to challenge our positive views of the deceased. At a wedding, surely there are reasons to worry about fault lines in the terrain the couple is standing on, but we don’t want the best man, in his toast, to point out any inconvenient truths.
Read Egan’s column and note the speakers he selects as some of the best from the recent past – Steve Jobs, David Foster Wallace, Stephen Colbert. None of these, to judge by the key quotes Egan selects, had a political edge or promoted one side of a controversial issue. They all offered something that the seniors could admire together, ponder philosophically together, or laugh at together.
Since rituals are about group solidarity and the symbolism of unity, what the speaker says may be less important than who the speaker is. The university is not just asking someone to make a good speech; it is bestowing an honor. The question is not whether the person should be heard, it’s whether the university should honor that person on behalf of the entire community. As Egan says,
The foreign policy that Rice guided for George W. Bush — two wars on the credit card, making torture a word associated with the United States — was clearly a debacle. Contemporary assessments were not kind, and history will be brutal.Rutgers students, if they are interested, can read her book or transcripts of her lectures. But surely we can understand why many graduates – maybe even more than a small knot – might not want their graduation ritual to extend her its benediction.
For our graduation speaker this year, the administration chose author James Patterson.
Of course, there are worse things for graduation than a divisive speaker or an airport paperback author. Egan mentions “broiling sun.” Cold and rain, our fate last year, can be just as bad.
------------------------------------
* In My Freshman Year, Rebekah Nathan (aka Cathy Small) gives her school the pseudonym Any U, echoing its true identity, NAU (Northern Arizona University). My favorite made-up name for a generic school comes from Montclair prof David Galef: U of All People.
“Ida” – Less Is More
May 10, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston
I saw the movie “Ida” last night. It’s a beautiful film. Ken Turan in the LA Times is right.
Poland, 1962. An 18-year old girl, an orphan, has been raised in an abbey and is now a novitiate about to take her vows. The mother superior tells her to first visit her aunt, her only living relative. The aunt tells her that her parents were Jews. They were at first sheltered by a Christian family but then killed. The two women set off in the aunt’s car to find out what happened – where are the parents buried, where did they live, who killed them.
So it’s a road movie. You can imagine how this might play out in a Hollywood film. The bonding of aunt and niece, the reclaiming of the family’s home and property (but only after much conflict, argument, and cleverly planned tactics by this undaunted duo), the girl finally embracing her true Jewish identity and deciding to leave the abbey and rejoin the real world . . . and that handsome musician, let’s not forget him.
Not in “Ida.” The movie is striking for what it doesn’t have – all those things we so take for granted in films that we don’t notice them until they are absent..
Color. “Ida” is shot in black-and-white and in the more squarish 4:3 aspect ratio (that’s 1.4 : 1; most films today are 1.8 or 2.4 : 1). The characters are at the bottom of the screen, with all that space at the top. Each shot looks like it might be a photograph in a museum.
Cutting: Those shots are held longer. The average shot in an American film these days is a couple of seconds. In “Ida,” the camera stays fixed longer, the characters move through the frame.
Talk: No lengthy discussions or arguments to make the characters’ motives and emotions unmistakable. A transcript of the film would run to only a few pages. Ida herself is especially laconic. And yet we know.
Music: Most films add music to tell you the mood of a scene. In “Ida,” you hear music only when the characters hear it – the aunt’s Mozart records, the dyed-blonde singer doing cheesy Euro rock -n-roll in a club (the quartet behind her stays after hours and plays Coltrane tunes*).
Action: Mostly walking and smoking. These are the actions which, in addition to the sparse dialogue, give us a sense of the characters. Even the sex in the sex scene is elided.
Happy or Uplifting Ending: In American road and buddy films, even when the heroes die – think of the freeze frame endings of “Butch Cassidy” or “Thelma and Louise” – there’s a sense of triumph. The ending of “Ida” is not ambiguous, as it might have been. But it’s not what audiences steeped in American films would want or expect. (Spoiler etiquette prevents me from giving details.)
Here’s the trailer. To get a more accurate feel of the film, first mute the sound, then hit the pause button frequently and just look at the composition of the shot.
Posted by Jay Livingston
I saw the movie “Ida” last night. It’s a beautiful film. Ken Turan in the LA Times is right.
a film of exceptional artistry whose emotions are as potent and persuasive as its images are indelibly beautiful.More than that, as I left the theater, I realized how busy, frenetic even, most movies are. “Most movies” means American movies. “Ida” conveys those potent emotions without any of the gimmicks found in other films.
Poland, 1962. An 18-year old girl, an orphan, has been raised in an abbey and is now a novitiate about to take her vows. The mother superior tells her to first visit her aunt, her only living relative. The aunt tells her that her parents were Jews. They were at first sheltered by a Christian family but then killed. The two women set off in the aunt’s car to find out what happened – where are the parents buried, where did they live, who killed them.
So it’s a road movie. You can imagine how this might play out in a Hollywood film. The bonding of aunt and niece, the reclaiming of the family’s home and property (but only after much conflict, argument, and cleverly planned tactics by this undaunted duo), the girl finally embracing her true Jewish identity and deciding to leave the abbey and rejoin the real world . . . and that handsome musician, let’s not forget him.
Not in “Ida.” The movie is striking for what it doesn’t have – all those things we so take for granted in films that we don’t notice them until they are absent..
Color. “Ida” is shot in black-and-white and in the more squarish 4:3 aspect ratio (that’s 1.4 : 1; most films today are 1.8 or 2.4 : 1). The characters are at the bottom of the screen, with all that space at the top. Each shot looks like it might be a photograph in a museum.
Cutting: Those shots are held longer. The average shot in an American film these days is a couple of seconds. In “Ida,” the camera stays fixed longer, the characters move through the frame.
Talk: No lengthy discussions or arguments to make the characters’ motives and emotions unmistakable. A transcript of the film would run to only a few pages. Ida herself is especially laconic. And yet we know.
Music: Most films add music to tell you the mood of a scene. In “Ida,” you hear music only when the characters hear it – the aunt’s Mozart records, the dyed-blonde singer doing cheesy Euro rock -n-roll in a club (the quartet behind her stays after hours and plays Coltrane tunes*).
Action: Mostly walking and smoking. These are the actions which, in addition to the sparse dialogue, give us a sense of the characters. Even the sex in the sex scene is elided.
Happy or Uplifting Ending: In American road and buddy films, even when the heroes die – think of the freeze frame endings of “Butch Cassidy” or “Thelma and Louise” – there’s a sense of triumph. The ending of “Ida” is not ambiguous, as it might have been. But it’s not what audiences steeped in American films would want or expect. (Spoiler etiquette prevents me from giving details.)
Here’s the trailer. To get a more accurate feel of the film, first mute the sound, then hit the pause button frequently and just look at the composition of the shot.
-------------------
* One of those Coltrane tunes, “Equinox,” wasn’t released until 1964. The movie is set in 1962, but who’s counting?
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