Uncertain About Uncertainty

June 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Listen to the Republicans, and you're certain to hear about uncertainty. What’s keeping unemployment high and stalling economic recovery? Uncertainty. Specifically, uncertainty about government regulation.

Now, here’s the evidence for it – Stephen L. Carter’s recent article “Economic Stagnation Explained, at 30,000 Feet”

The man in the aisle seat is trying to tell me why he refuses to hire anybody. His business is successful, he says, as the 737 cruises smoothly eastward. Demand for his product is up. But he still won’t hire.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know how much it will cost,” he explains. “How can I hire new workers today, when I don’t know how much they will cost me tomorrow?”
He’s referring not to wages, but to regulation: He has no way of telling what new rules will go into effect when. His business, although it covers several states, operates on low margins. He can’t afford to take the chance of losing what little profit there is to the next round of regulatory changes. And so he’s hiring nobody until he has some certainty about cost.

It’s anecdotal evidence, useful as an illustration. But we don’t know if it describes what’s going on with most other businesses. In fact, Carter’s seatmate might not even be accurate about his own firm. As Will Wilkinson and Ezra Klein suggest, the guy might be repeating the Republican line just because he’s a Republican.

A lot of people who do the hiring (or decide not to hire) are Republicans.

If companies aren’t hiring, the real problem, I suspect, is not lack of certainty but lack of customers. A NFIB report last fall, “Small Business Economic Trends,” asked small businesses what their “single most important problem” was. Unfortunately, “uncertainty about regulation” was not one of the choices, but the survey did offer “regulation”

(Click on the image for larger view.)

The big winner is lack of demand. Three years ago, fewer than 10% rated it as the most important problem. In the current recession, that has risen to over 30%.

The NYT had a very pretty graph of the longitudinal data.*


The Poor Sales section (white in the graph) suggests that when demand is high (good sales), as it was in the 90s, business have the luxury of worrying about regulation (orange). In good times, when employment is high, businesses may have trouble finding enough qualified workers (blue). But the problem today is not too much regulation or too few workers. It’s lack of demand.

I am not in business, but if demand is really up, as Carter’s seatmate claims, and if you don’t hire more workers, there are only two options:

• Get more out of your current workers – better technology or more hours.
• Ignore the demand.

The Times reported recently (here) that while businesses have been slow to hire more workers, they have been buying more machines and software. The Times story does not say how much of this investment in technology was coming from small businesses and how much from large firms that may be sitting on large amounts of cash and may as well invest it now.

But there are limits what newly-bought technology can do to increase production in the short run, and there are limits to how much employees can or will work.

As for option two – ignoring the demand – if the guy on the plane is letting orders go unfilled because he doesn’t want to hire workers, he is leaving money on the table. As I say, I’m not an MBA, but I suspect that not many “business models” (as we say today) call for turning away customers.

The point is that neither of these responses has anything to do with uncertainty about regulation. If businesses are not hiring, it’s probably because they are uncertain of how much of their product they can sell.

* The trouble with this data is that each year the percents must add up to 100% no matter how numerous or few the problems are.

America - the Default Setting

June 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

From the loop, I took the CTA Red Line up to Lawrence, 4800 North. (I’m in Chicago for a wedding.) Late Friday afternoon. My fellow passengers were the same multi-ethnic, multi-racial mix I’m used to in New York - the U.N. on casual Friday.

I don’t think Gov. Perry of Texas spends much time on the subway. Earlier this week, he proclaimed August 6 as a Day of Prayer and Fasting

As a nation, we must come together, call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles . . . The humility of the truly great men of history was revealed in their recognition of the power and might of Jesus to save all who call on His great name.

Look at those first ten words. Gov. Perry seems to assume that everyone in America is Christian. Or should be. As in America, so too in history – all the greats worth noting are Christian men.*

It’s the same view of the US that Justice Scalia would write into the Constitution. The government putting crosses on the graves of Jewish soldiers does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In fact, says Scalia, the Jews and their families should feel honored. (See earlier posts here and here.)

For Gov. Perry and the others, the default setting for America is white, male, Christian. Other exotic types that they might know about are like strange mathematical systems – base 2 or logarithms. They exist, of course, but the real way of thinking about numbers is good old base 10.

Gov. Perry has asked other governors to join him in this August effort. That way, our entire nation will come together by praying to Jesus. The logical inference is that if you don’t pray to Jesus, you’re not part of the nation. Just as Gov. Perry’s nation doesn't include those who don’t pray to Jesus, his history book has no page for Einstein or Confucius or Gandhi (and certainly not Anne Frank). His calendar for August has no indication of Hiroshima.

Maybe this is a view of America you get from the Governor’s mansion in Texas and no doubt from many other places. But it’s not the picture you get when you ride the bus or subway.

* Mark Kleiman and his commenters compiled a long list of great men of history, from Abraham Aristotle to Zheng He, who did not recognize Jesus’s power to save.

Difference, Distance, and Distribution

June 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a famous, though probably apocryphal, quotation, F. Scott Fitzgerald says to Ernest Hemingway, “You know, the rich really are different than you and me.” Hemingway replies, “Yeah, they have more money.”

You can imagine the same conversation with “poor” instead of “rich.”

The question for those who are neither rich nor poor, those in the great middle, is how similar they feel to the people at either end of the income curve. That sense of difference or similarity may be especially important for people’s ideas about redistribution. If you feel some kinship with the poor, you’ll do what you can to protect Robin Hood. If you feel that you have more in common with the wealthy, you’ll rat him out to the sheriff.

Polls and policies are not always in sync. But when it comes to inequality and redistribution, Americans – both the general public and their legislators – differ from people in other countries. We are exceptionally tolerant of income inequality and exceptionally resistant to income redistribution – at least when that redistribution means government actions that shift benefits from the wealthy to the poor. My guess is that this resistance reflects the middle-class perception of having much more in common with the rich than with the poor.

It’s nice to find confirmation for your hunches even when those hunches are pessimistic. Henry Farrell at The Monkey Cage recently summarized this paper by Lupu and Pontusson. Their research on 15-18 OECD countries finds that

the key factor determining redistribution is the income gap between middle income voters and lower income voters . . . When the gap is high, middle class people will have a much weaker sense of solidarity with the poor, and hence be less supportive of redistribution.

Lupu and Pontusson use a measure they call “skew” – the ratio of the dollar distance of the middle from those at either end of the distribution. The question is: where do those in the middle stand relative to the rich and the poor. In the US, those in the middle of the income distribution are closer to the poor, the bottom 10%, than to the top 10%, probably because in the last few decades the very rich have zoomed even farther away from the other 95-99% of the population. If the US middle class followed the pattern of the other OECD countries, they would be more for Robin Hood. But they are not.

How then to explain the anti-redistribution preferences of the American middle?

In a post a few months ago (here), I suggested that perceived distance was still an important factor in our reluctance to redistribute, but that the distance was not so much economic as it was racial. What made the poor different was not their level of poverty but their race.

The Lupu-Pontusson paper reaches the same conclusion. Again quoting Henry’s summary:

Lupu and Pontusson . . argue that the explanation for this is straightforward – “it is clearly attributable to the high-concentration of racial-ethnic minorities in the bottom of the income distribution.” More bluntly put – middle class Americans feel less solidarity with the very poor because the very poor are more likely to be black.

So Fitzgerald might well have said, “You know Ernest, the poor really are different from you and me.” And Hemingway, having read the Lupu-Pontusson paper, would reply, “Yeah, they’re darker.”*

* What Hemingway would say is probably more like: “The poor have no money. But they are good people. When they fight in the bars it is a good fight, a true fight. Sometimes they have nada. It is a Spanish word. It means nothing. Nada. Nada. Sometimes when you run the regression, you get nada. The betas weigh no more than an ant and they have no stars. Nada. But sometimes you get the big r. It is a strong r, a true r. Then you go to the café and drink the cold crisp white wine.”

Cancer Is Good For You (Asthma Too)

June 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the 1950s, as the evidence on smoking was becoming undeniable, someone suggested that the cigarette companies were about to launch a new ad campaign: “Cancer is good for you.”

It was a joke, of course. But how about “A really bad is recession is good for your marriage”? No joke. The National Marriage Project has released a report with a section claiming that the current economic crises has produced “two silver linings” for marriages. Philip Cohen at Family Inequality eviscerates this report with the level of snark that it deserves.

A bad recession is good for crime too, or so says the title of James Q. Wilson’s article in last Sunday’s Wall Street Journal:

Hard Times, Fewer Crimes*

And now welcome the next cancer-is-good-for-you entrant, Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private coal company, which spends millions each year lobbying against clean-air legislation. Last month, Peabody was the object of Coal Cares, a clever spoof Website

(Click on the image for a larger view. Or go to the Website.)

What appears in this recent screen grab as “Patriot Coal” was, in the original version, “Peabody Coal.” For some reason,** the creators of the Website changed it. But it was Peabody’s press release in response that makes them the clear winner of the Cancer-Is-Good-For-You competition.

The United Nations has linked life expectancy, educational attainment and income with per-capita electricity use, and the World Resources Institute found that for every tenfold increase in per-capita energy use, individuals live 10 years longer.

The spurious logic – the implied fallacy of composition, fobbing off correlation as cause – is so obvious that it could easily be part of the Coal Cares spoof. But no, it was for real, at least while it lasted. Unfortunately, Peabody removed the document before we could award them the CIGFY trophy.

What the UN data actually show is not surprising: Richer countries produce more electricity. They also have better health, education, and income. The message Peabody wants us to get takes the global and misapplies it locally, and it reverses cause and effect If you want to be long-lived, educated, and rich, live near a coal-driven power plant.

Cancer, asthma, and heart disease are all good for you.

*I don’t know if Wilson wrote that headline. Unlike the post-hoc logic the title suggests, Wilson does not argue that the recession caused the decrease. But he does imply that the recession did not exert any upward force on crime.

**Peabody is no stranger to lawsuits, and while they are usually the defendants, their massive legal guns can also shoot from the plaintiff side.

Meatheads

June 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Henry Tischler called my attention to this nugget in the Wall Street Journal a week or so ago:

Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law “Meathead” for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn't get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate.

(I guess the WSJ is trying to catch up to The Weekly Standard in the let’s-trash-sociology category.)

It’s from a piece by Harvey Mansfield. In a mere 500 words, Mansfield manages to be both a know-nothing and an elitist. As a know-nothing, he’s leery of quantitative research. As an elitist, he apparently thinks that a university should be like the military academies, which he mentions in his first paragraph, telling students what to study, and what to think. He’s all for instilling values, but only if they are the right values, i.e., Mansfield’s values.

Just as Gender Studies taints the whole university with its sexless fantasies, so economists infect their neighbors with the imitation science they peddle.

That pretty much summarizes his view of what’s wrong with universities – taint from the wrong values, infection from quantitative data and logic. You can read the whole thing here.

iMagic

June 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

No sociology in this post, and if you don’t like magic, read no further. But if you have an iPad, you should watch this.


(Personal note: the app that may tip the balance and tip me into iPadland is one that a piano player, Andy Ezrin, showed me – the iRealBook. He had it on his iPhone).

HT: Richard Wiseman

Careers in Academia – Endings and Beginnings

June 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Rubinstein, professor of sociology, was, by his own account, something of a slacker. Now that he has retired, he’s telling tales out of school (i.e., at the Weekly Standard) about how much he was paid for how little work.

Sure, he didn’t do squat, he seems to have been a lousy teacher. But even though he pranked academia for several decades, and even though he’s standing there, thumbs to ears, waggling his fingers and sticking out his tongue at his former home, I’m ambivalent about lobbing tomatoes at him. You see, I owe my first job, and the prestigious name Princeton on my vita, to a Rubinstein-like professor.

I had finished my third year in grad school and had no more course work to do, just the dissertation. It was a mid-May afternoon, and I was hanging around in the department. The academic business for the semester was over. Almost nobody else was around, and I was chatting with one of the secretaries who I was on good terms with. A call came in. She answered it. I discreetly moved down the hall.

When I came back, she said, “That was John Darley at Princeton. They need an advanced graduate student to be on the faculty. Here’s his number.”

I called back almost immediately. John was the head of the social psychology section of the psychology department. He explained that there was a guy in the department, an older, tenured professor, that they’d been trying to get rid of for years. He taught the minimum, did little or no research, didn’t work with any of the grad students, and spent most of his time in his office on the phone making real estate deals. Finally, he had announced his retirement, leaving the department with a use-it-or-lose-it line and no time to do a real search.

John was calling his old professors looking for a grad student to fill in. I guess I sounded reasonable, for he told me to fly down to Newark, rent a car, and drive to Princeton for an interview. Which I did. The “interview” was a year-end department party, faculty and students drinking and milling around, and I was introduced to them. That was about it.

A day or two after I had returned to Boston, John called and told me I had the job – a lectureship. I wouldn’t really be teaching. I’d run some “precepts” (discussion sections) – basically what their grad students did. My instructor’s salary was at the bottom of the faculty scale, but it was three times as much as the stipends my fellow grad students got. And if I needed secretarial help (this was way before computers), all I had to do was ask. All told, a sweet deal. I had my own office and plenty of time to work on writing my dissertation. Come to think of it, I was bit like Rubinstein myself, getting pretty good money for not very much work.

I’m not sure what Princeton got out of it except a place-holder for two semesters. It was made clear to me that I needn’t bother entering the real search that they were doing during my time there (though I did attend a couple of the presentations). That was fine with me, for as I got to know what academic psychology was, I realized that I definitely was not a psychologist.

That was my first job in academia – two semesters and out. I held what John referred to as the Folding Chair in Social Psychology.

Politics – Means and Ends

June 5, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Matt Yglesias posted at this chart of poll results in eight states that elected Republican governors. In seven of the eight, if the election were held today, Democrats would win.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Matt calls this shift “buyer’s remorse” and takes it as a rejection of GOP policies (his post is here). Gabriel Rossman has a different take.

Repeat after me: REGRESSION TO THE MEAN.

I don’t doubt that some of this is substantive backlash to overreach on the part of politically ignorant swing voters who didn’t really understand the GOP platform, but really, you’ve still got to keep in mind REGRESSION TO THE MEAN.

Politicos like Yglesias might have overlooked this possibility because regression to the mean is mostly a matter of random “error variation,”* or unexplained variation. Intuitively, that doesn’t seem to fit with political opinions. If I get an unusually high score in a bowling game or a math test, I can try to explain it – something about my footwork or concentration. But I also realize that I may have been playing over my head. I have some sense of my true level of ability. I also know that my scores vary, and for reasons I can’t always explain. If you tell me that my lower score in the next game is regression to the mean, I’m not going argue.

It’s much harder to think this way about my opinion about the governor or anyone else’s opinion for that matter. Whether or not I’d vote for him is not a sample of my opinion. It is my opinion. It’s not random, it’s not an error, and it’s not unexplained. I know why I would or wouldn’t vote for him, and I figure that the same is true for other voters. So you can see why discussions of political shifts tend to leave out regression to the mean.

Even so, is the political shift here regression to the mean? It might help if we had some idea of what the mean is. Suppose that the mean is 50/50 Democratic/Republican. A shift from 8-0 in favor of the GOP to 1-7 in favor of the Democrats is regression way beyond the mean. So, like Lucy, we still have some splainin to do.

* I do not know, though I should, how this variation came to be called “error” or why we persist in using that term.

Graphs - Framing the Data (and the President)

June 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I assume that most people reading this blog have already seen Philip Cohen’s take-down of this graph that’s been spreading through the right-wing neighborhoods of the blogosphere.

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

Check out Philip’s analysis at his Family Inequality blog (here).

It’s basically a “gee-whiz” graph. The examples I’ve mentioned earlier in this blog (here, for example) worked their effect by skimming the top of the y-axis. The food stamp graph also hacks off most of the x-axis. It’s not very sophisticated cheating, but it’s all for the noble conservative purpose of showing what Michelle Malkin calls Obama’s “mission of dependency.”

Philip provides the graph below to make visible what the right-wingers choose not to see. (I have added the yellow frame showing roughly the portion of the graph preferred and promulgated by Malkin, et. al.)

The Ad That Wasn’t

May 30, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bringing in new customers is a challenge for any organization, especially museums.

In the first season of thirtysomething, Michael and Elliot, who run a small ad agency, have to come up with a campaign for the local arts center, which is trying to broaden its base. They struggle, they founder, they fail. The best they can do is a poster with a photo of a hard hat guy and the caption, “Yo, it’s my arts center.” The city, sensibly, rejects their proposal.

But how can a museum reach people other than those they usually reach? Among current museum-goers, according to a survey of 40,000 households,

• 92% are white
• 70% are over the age of 30
• 81% have college degrees
• 82% have incomes above the national median
• For history museums, age was even more skewed – only about a third were under 50.

Enter Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler and their “Historically Hardcore” Smithsonian campaign.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I wish I could report on the success of this campaign in bringing a younger and more diverse audience to the museum. But unfortunately, this campaign, like the one in thirtysomething, was fictional. They did it as an exercise, and the posters lived only in cyberspace, where they flourished briefly. Reddit put them on their front page. Burrows was thrilled at first, then cautious. As she writes on her blog,

I decided it was probably time to get in touch with someone from Smithsonian, just to cover my ass. Well, they were less than pleased about the attention the posters were getting and requested that I take them down immediately.

She scrubbed the posters of any Smithsonian traces. You will never see them on the sides of buses or the walls of the Metro. The Smithsonian, apparently, has no desire to appeal to a hardcore constituency. Our great national institution will continue to round up the usual subjects.*

HT: Total Drek

*thirtysomething was great TV, but it played to the same demographic as museums, though perhaps a bit younger. The show often seemed to be written about, by, and for English majors from elite universities. Here’s a bit of script I found. Gary and Susannah, new parents, are talking with two couples whose children are slightly older – Michael and Hope, and Elliot and Nancy.

GARY
Why would I make something like that up?
Seriously. I swear. I put them both in
front of her, right? Runaway Bunny and Ulysses.

MICHAEL
And let me guess: she went right to Ulysses?

GARY
Right.

SUSANNAH
And put it in her mouth. You
forgot to mention that, right?

MICHAEL
So big deal. Listen. Janey, by the
time she was five months old had
eaten most of the major early work
of Saul Bellow,up to and including
Henderson the Rain King, but hey,
I don't like to brag.

HOPE
Oh, I'm sure Emma's as bright as a button, Gary.

NANCY
Hey, hey, what was that woman on the Lucy Show
that was always bragging about her kids?

SUSANNAH [definitively]
Caroline Appleby. The kid's name was 'Stevie.'

GARY [turning to her, clearly surprised]
I... I thought you hated pop culture?

SUSANNAH
Lucy isn't pop culture. Lucy is God

Underground Norms

May 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

This happened yesterday as I was returning from the Book Fair at the Javitz Center. For some reason, I decided to write it in verse.

SHOOTING ON THE UPTOWN #1 TRAIN

The Broadway local had stopped at Times Square.
A dozen more passengers pushed their way in.
No seats left but still there was some room to spare.
Three-thirty, rush hour about to begin.

The last to get on were four older black guys.
The one in a t-shirt was noticeably loud.
Some people glanced up then averted their eyes.
That’s how we react to a nut in the crowd.

The doors closed. The guy called, “Hey, what do y’all say?”
Then in that same voice, he broke into a song,
“I’ve got sunshine,” he sang out, “on a cloudy day
Then the other three guys started singing along,

Their harmony perfect, their timing on cue,
And as the train picked up some speed between stations.
You could feel the crowd mood get sunnier too,
Brought to life by these One-Train-Uptown Temptations.

The lead singer paused as he finished a verse
Looked the car up and down, made a cheerful, short plea
As he held out a large rumpled red nylon purse,
“Folks, give what you like, or buy our CD.”

Some gave coins or a bill – easy enough to afford.
But a twenty-ish woman who didn’t comply
Took out her iPhone and began to record.
As the quartet, still singing “My Girl” shuffled by.

“You’re taking our picture, and you won’t give a dime?”
Asked the leader. The girl did not say a thing.
The men moved on quickly – no sense losing time.
Other train cars to try, other songs still to sing.

But a rider across from the blond iPhone user
Apparently irked by her cheap, selfish ways,
Stood up, crossed the car, and as if to accuse her
Stared down with a challenging, withering gaze.

“You didn’t give a cent?” he asked. “Have you no shame?
“That totally sucks,” in his judgmental tone
“I don’t have any money,” but she knew this was lame.
“No money? Bullshit. You’ve got a fucking iPhone.”

She sat there in silence. What more could he do
To keep her selfishness on the informal docket?
Then he realized maybe he wasn’t quite through
For his own camera sat in his left front pants pocket.

Still staring at her across two feet of space,
He took out the camera and aimed at his spot.
But she lowered her sunglasses onto her face
Before he could zoom in and take the first shot.

Flash went the camera, and stalking his prey,.
The man moved to get a clear shot of her face.
A second flash came as the girl turned away
From this Canon-armed man in the cramped subway space.

She was fuming, but given how she’d used her phone,
She couldn’t very well speak up to complain.
Or tell the guy loudly to leave her alone.
Then at last, at the next stop, he got off the train.

Like another bit of verse about shooting, Frankie and Johnny, this story has no moral, this story has no end. This story just goes to show that in any situation, norms may be contradictory, and acts of informal social control may themselves violate norms.

Norms are the functional equivalent of laws. Laws protect property and bodies. Norms protect the self, as Goffman said a half century ago. He also pointed out that by calling attention to someone else’s norm violation, we may ourselves be violating the norms that protect that person. The man on the subway trying to enforce some norm of reciprocity was crossing the boundary protecting the girl.

It also shows that “primitive” or “magical” ideas about cameras – that they steal the soul of the subject – might have some resonance even in our own camera-drenched climate. The subway singers felt that the girl had unfairly taken something from them without compensation. And clearly the crank avenger, shooting with his Canon, was using his camera as a weapon to diminish the self, the personhood, of the iPhone girl.

Gingrich, Weber, Bourdieu

May 26, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I imagine that Stewart, Colbert, Letterman, and the rest must have had fun with the Gingrich-Tiffany story. (I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been watching much TV lately, and it didn’t come up at all on “Dancing With the Stars.”) Newt had a $500,000 revolving charge account at Tiffany’s. Apparently he was a good customer.

The story was something of an embarrassment, and Gingrich tried to make the best of it.

If the U.S. government was as debt-free as I am, everybody in America would be celebrating. I think I have proven I can manage money.

I don’t know how this is playing out there in America – I haven’t seen any opinion surveys. But the Times went to the heartland for quotes:

But out in Iowa, Mr. Robinson says buying jewelry on credit somehow feels different from buying a refrigerator or a new washing machine. Rich Galen, a former Gingrich aide, agrees.
“It’s not something that normal people do,” Mr. Galen said. “I understand he’s made a lot of money and he’s done very well, and God bless him for it, but that’s sort of a departure from the Newt Gingrich that I knew.”

At first, I thought that this reaction was pure Protestant Ethic. It’s OK to make as much money as you can, and we’ll even tax you less. But don’t spend it for pleasure.

But on second thought, the problem isn’t that Gingrich spent rather than reinvesting or giving to charity. The problem is what he bought – or rather, where he bought, since he refuses to say exactly what his Tiffany purchases were. A $25,000 Tiffany necklace, even for your wife, is too elitist.

What is it OK to spend money on? A ranch, where you can clear brush and ride a horse into the sunset. But probably not a villa. A sports team is probably OK but not a Jackson Pollack. A Hummer (if they were still made) but not a Rolls.

What else should go on the approved list? The trick is to avoid implying that your tastes are better, or even different, from those of the ordinary guy. In America, we may not be egalitarian about wealth and power – hats off to those who have the most. But we are egalitarian about taste. You want to have tastes that do NOT require any special abilities of distinction or any education. You want to your tastes to be the same as what the woman in Iowa calls “normal people.”

It makes me wonder: what if Bourdieu had been American rather than French?

The Bad News

May 24, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Socioblog has never been one to shrink away from reporting the facts even when the news is bad. So here is a screen shot of an interactive graphic at the Chronicle. It’s based on Census Bureau data.

(Click on the image for a larger view.
Click on the Chronicle link above to get the full
interactive graph and see the breakdowns in each category.)

Oh, well – at least we didn’t get a BA in counseling psychology.

HT: Arnie Korotkin, whose Little Falls blog is here.

Conservative Grades, Liberal Grades

May 23, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Would conservative students prefer greater inequality in grades? That was the question I asked in a recent post. I was responding to a stunt by the Merced Republicans that asked A-students if they would be willing to give some of their GPA points to lower-GPA students in order to reduce inequality. The Republicans opposed such redistribution, so I wondered just how deep and solid was their preference for inequality. Would they favor a return to the less equal grade distributions of the 1940s, with far fewer As and more Cs and Ds?

My proposal was far more realistic. Students cannot transfer their GPA points, but professors can change their grading scales. And, at least in one study, Republican professors create grade distributions with greater inequality than those of their Democratic colleagues. Here’s a graph from a forthcoming article by Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

Students with high SATs get higher grades than do low-SAT students (despite all the criticisms of the SAT, it is still a good predictor of college performance). But those high-SAT students are more likely to get the highest marks in courses taught by Republicans. Students with low SAT scores get better grades from Democrats than they do from Republicans.

Relative to their Democratic colleagues, Republican professors tend to assign more very low and very high grades: the share of the lowest grades (F, D-, D, D+, and C-) out of the total is 6.2 percent in courses taught by Republican professors and only 4.0 percent in courses taught by Democratic professors; the share of the highest grade (A+) out the total is 8.0 percent in courses taught by Republican professors and only 3.5 percent in courses taught by Democratic professors.

The students were undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences at “an elite university.” The paper has been mentioned at The Monkey Cage and at a WSJ blog.

Congratulations CHSS grads

May 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences had its convocation Thursday on the football field. The students walked across the platform, shook hands with the president and the dean, then went back to the bleachers.

(MSU photo. Other pictures are here.)

I had nothing to do with the program. I sat on the stage with the other department chairs, and I stood up when the guys from the Dean’s office read the names of graduating Sociology majors. But if it had been up to me, I would have made a large backdrop of this graph showing scores on the CLA, an assessment of how much students learn in college.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The authors of the report* summarize their findings

There is notable variation in academic experiences and outcomes across fields of study. . . .While appreciating the diverse causes of differences by field of study, we observed several patterns in our data:

Students majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields, including social science, humanities, natural science, and mathematics, demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.

Students majoring in business, education, social work, and communications had the lowest measurable gains.

*“Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” by Arum, Roksma, and Cho. (Full report downloadable here.)

Oh, Brother

May 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture has a nice post – theory by Roger Gould, data by Cornel West. Gould is talking about status hierarchies and reciprocity. West is talking about feeling snubbed by “my dear brother Barack Obama.”

Everybody, it seems, is West’s brother. “I was under the impression that he [Obama] might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman.” In the interview, recorded by Chris Hedges, West uses the word another ten times.

It reminded me of a story my brother (my real brother, Skip) told me long ago, back when he was an undergrad at U Chicago. Ralph Ellison had given a lecture there, and afterwards Skip asked him if The Brotherhood in Invisible Man was based on a real organization.

“It’s not the Communist Party, if that’s what you mean,” Ellison said. He added that the idea of brotherhood had been used throughout history as a cover for a variety of unsavory schemes. “When someone starts calling you brother,” Ellison said, “stick your hands in your pockets. And cross your legs.”

Name and Profession - A Positive Correlation

May 19, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve known for a long time that the brains behind Playboy’s marketing strategy, especially in its early decades, was a sociologist – A. C. Spectorsky (in 1955, he coined the term exurb in his book The Exurbanites). Now, thanks to Scott McLemee’s Inside Higher Ed review of a new book about Playboy, I learn that the A.C. stood for Auguste Comte.

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve been skeptical about the influence of names – the research purporting to show that batters whose names begin with K are more likely to strike out, that students with D-names get lower grades than do A-name students, that women named Laura are more likely to become lawyers and men named Dennis dentists, or that boys named Tennyson are more likely to go to college in Tennessee. (The posts are here and here .)

But now with A.C., I may have to rethink this name thing.

Win Ben Stein's Advocacy

May 18, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a comment on the previous post, “Anonymous” takes me to task for not writing about Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the hotel maid as members of social categories (“a high-power white man attempting to rape an African immigrant woman”).

Now Ben Stein, in an American Spectator post yesterday, uses reasoning by social category but on behalf of Strauss-Kahn.

In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes? Is it likely that just by chance this hotel maid found the only one in this category? Maybe Mr. Strauss-Kahn is guilty but if so, he is one of a kind, and criminals are not usually one of a kind.

What do we know about the complainant besides that she is a hotel maid? I am sure she is a fine woman. On the other hand, I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me. How do we know that this woman's word was good enough to put Mr. Strauss-Kahn straight into a horrific jail? Putting a man in Riker's is serious business. Maybe more than a few minutes of investigation is merited before it's done.

Drawing conclusions about an individual’s motivations, behavior, honesty, etc., based on these demographic characteristics – there’s a word for that: stereotyping.

• Powerful white men go around trying to rape powerless women.
• Very successful economists don’t commit violent crime.
• Privileged people get away with crimes against powerless victims
• Chambermaids, out of their own self-interest, can be dishonest.

Simple caricature and plotline. You can take the few facts that have become public and create the comic book you prefer. In fact, we often do convert the world into familiar stories. The trouble is that these stories are not always accurate.

The one thing that Stein says that is not in dispute is that Rikers (like jails generally) is horrific. I wonder whether he has ever before expressed this concern. I don’t know all of Stein’s oeuvre, but maybe others can enlighten me. (Obvious Ben Stein tag line here.)

L'Etat C'est Moi

May 15, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the likely Socialist candidate for President of France, was arrested in New York, accused of sexual assault on a chambermaid in his hotel.

Strauss-Kahn no longer electable for many French (Reuters)

Strauss-Kahn Rape-Attempt Charge May End Presidential Prospects (Bloomberg )

Allegations leave presidency bid in tatters (Financial Times)

None of those headlines about Strauss-Kahn’s political future rests on actual evidence except perhaps a brief in-the-street interview or the estimate of some politician. Maybe DSK’s presidential career is fini, at least for now. But maybe it isn’t. The point is that the people who wrote those headlines and articles don’t really know what the electorate thinks. Like Louis XIV, they are conflating themselves with the nation. (Another post on this bit of journalistic arrogance is here.)

The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on January 17, 1998. Here are some headlines from that time.

People Talking about Clinton: 'If He's Lying, It's Over' (AP, Jan. 22)

Clinton's Cooked If It's Fire, Not Just Smoke (Daily News, Jan 22. 1998)

Public's Tolerance Wears Thin (Star-Ledger, Jan. 23)

Some pundits assured us that Clinton’s presidency was all but over. The nation would not tolerate such behavior. Sam Donaldson, a top reporter at ABC news, predicted that Clinton would resign within days. These predictions seemed like a good idea at the time. But Clinton remained in office.

Later, Donaldson said he was “just dumb” to have made that prediction. But in October,a month before the election, he made the same prediction based on his reading of “the American public.” Wrong again.

Are A-student Liberals Hypocrites?

May 13, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

On his Overcoming Bias blog, Robin Hanson posted a video of UC Merced College Republicans asking A-students to sign a petition to redistribute GPA points. Students with high GPAs, the top 10%, would give up some fraction of points; those with low GPAs would get those points.

Nobody signs the petition.

As the kid in the video says, the proposal is supposed to be “ kind of like emulating the federal tax structure.” These liberal students favor a progressive income tax to pay for federal programs for the poor, yet they won’t give their own GPA points to those who are poor in GPA. Gotcha.

The students cannot come up with reasons why their positions are not inconsistent. Robin Hanson pronounces them guilty of “Natural Hypocrisy.” Megan McCardle, who slings an even heavier blog than Hanson, smashes the arguments for why GPA redistribution is different from a progressive income tax.

Yes, grades do share certain qualities with income, and students often use the language of money and income when they speak and think about a grade – it’s what you earn by working, and you try to maximize it, sometimes with the least amount of effort (students have to budget their time).

But the analogy is far from perfect. The GPA proposal has only one goal – to reduce grade inequality. But taxes are not primarily intended to be a mechanism of direct redistribution. Taxes are primarily intended to pay for what the government does. Some of those things benefit the poor. Some don’t. (If it weren’t for taxes, those Merced Republicans would be paying double what they are now for their college education.) Over half of the federal budget goes for the military, Social Security, and Medicare – programs whose benefits do not exclude anyone, even the rich. So the question is who should pay how much. Should the rich pay a higher rate?

GPA points, unlike taxes, don’t pay for anything. So students at every GPA level would object to any tax on their GPA, even a flat tax. If you asked the Merced Republicans to sign a petition to lower everyone’s GPA by 10%, you wouldn’t get many signers. Does that mean they oppose a flat tax? Or if they support a flat tax on income but oppose the 10% GPA reduction, are they natural (or unnatural) hypocrites? No, because nobody would benefit from those lost GPA points.

But suppose GPA points actually could buy something useful for the school – improved health services, for example. Would high-GPA students object to paying more of their points while students with fewer GPA points paid less? Would healthy students gripe that their GPA points were going to benefit only the sick and not themselves? I doubt it. Consider the example – a real example, not a hypothetical one or a phony petition – of scholarship programs. These benefit lower-income students while more affluent students pay full fare. Have you ever heard even one full-fare student or parent complain about financial aid going only to lower-income students rather than to a tuition-reduction for themselves? I’ve certainly heard parents and students complain about tuition, but I’ve never heard them complain about financial aid that goes to others. (Of course, I have no idea what college Republicans say among themselves.)

As for reducing GPA inequality, that has already happened thanks to grade inflation. Back in January, I posted (here) a grade sheet from a Harvard class JFK took seventy years ago.** The average grade was C+. In a class of nearly sixty students, nobody got an A, two students got A-. How do conservative students feel about this narrowing of inequality, this inflation that cheapens the value of an A?

How about another petition? Let’s take our camcorder to a campus with mostly conservative and libertarian students and ask them to sign a petition calling for grade deflation. Here’s our pitch: “Right now, the real distribution of grades runs from A to B, maybe B-. We want professors to use the full grading range, A down to F. The student who’s now getting B- would get a D or D+, a C- would probably be an F, those getting a B would get a C or C-. A’s would be really, really hard to get. This will make students work harder and learn more, which is what college is all about. Here’s the petition; here’s a pen.”

Will the UC Merced Republicans sign?

* There are rich people who feel that taxes should be more progressive – very rich people, like Warren Buffet.
** “Where’d you get a grade sheet from 1940?” a friend asked. I said that the professor was a little late turning in his grades. My friend, who had also served as department chair at her school, thought that was a pretty good joke.