The Economy Is Lousy – But Where?

June 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images


What’s familiar isn’t so bad, even if it’s bad. 

One of the things I remember from my days in the crim biz is that people’s perceptions of crime don’t have a lot to do with actual crime rates. This was back in the high-crime decades, and people were more afraid of crime than they are now.  But people felt safer in their own neighborhoods than in other neighborhoods, even when their own neighborhoods had a higher crime rate. 

These were the days when I would give someone directions to my building – “Get off the IRT* at 72nd St. . . . .” – and they would often ask, “Is it safe?” 

“Of course it’s safe.  It’s my neighborhood,” I would say, “I live here. I ought to know.” Yet when I would go to a party in the East 20s or, God forbid, Brooklyn, I would emerge from the subway and follow the directions with a certain sense of apprehension and caution. 

Apparently, the same link between far and fear holds true for people’s perceptions of economic well-being.  A recent Gallup poll asked people how the economy was in places ranging from their own city or area to the world generally.  The closer to home, the better the economy.  The farther from home, the lower the percent of people rating economic conditions as excellent or good.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

And the farther from home, the higher the percent of people rating economic conditions as “only fair” or poor.

Republicans were the most pessimistic about the economy, regardless of location.  Democrats were the most sanguine, with Independents in between. The graph shows the percent who rated the economy positively minus the percent who rated it Poor.

This obviously has nothing to do with familiarity but with contempt.  Apparently, for Republicans, a Democrat – especially a Kenyan socialist Democrat – in the White House means that the economy must be bad everywhere.

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* These old subway line designations – IRT, BMT, IND – are no longer in official use.  But when did the MTA jettison them?  If you know the answer, please tell me.

UPDATE, June 22:  Andrew Gelman has formatted the data as line graphs, making the comparisons and trends clearer.  He has also added his own observations – things I wish I had known or thought of.

The Kids Are All Right – But Where?

June 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Philip Cohen was on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” last week (listen here) talking about research showing the advantages of two-parent families.

childcare . . . security, health insurance, stable housing. These are among the things that are transferred from married parents to their children in terms of benefits, and those are the things where we should try to focus our energies rather than worrying about the marital status of the parents.

The rate of unmarried parenthood continues to rise despite much government effort to prevent it, not to mention the messages from church, school, and other institutions.  Philip’s point was that rather than try to fix marriage (or non-marriage), we should try to fix the problems that arise from it.  In the US, about 40% of children are born to unmarried mothers.  But in other countries, Scandinavian countries especially,  the rate is even higher – ranging from 46% in Denmark to 66% in Iceland.  Even countries lower down the list have seen an increase.  In Italy, the rate in 1980 was 4%; in 2007, 21%

But if we look at the lives of children in the wealthy countries, the US does not compare favorably.
The website Good News (here) offers the graphic “Where Are the Best (and Worst) Countries to Be a Child?”  It gives the overall rating and the six dimensions that scale is based on. For the full picture, go to their site.  Meanwhile, here are some screen grabs.  Click on an image for a larger view.  [Warning:  if you think of the US (or the UK) as an ideal place for kids, maybe you should stop reading now.]

Here is the overall rating.

These indicators are based on aggregate data for each country.  The US and UK have the greatest degree of economic inequality, and this inequality probably also enters into the data on the welfare of children.  The US may be an excellent place for children in the top ranges of the income distribution, especially on dimensions like material well-being, but children from poor and even middle-income families in the US are worse off than their counterparts in these other countries, so much so that they drag the US average down to the low end of the scale.  In countries like Sweden, with less inequality and more support for families and children, the differences among children are smaller, and consequently, the average outcomes are better. 

Drawing the Negative Space

June 14, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

My roommate in grad school enrolled in a life drawing class. I’m not sure why; he was probably not much more talented at drawing than I was (he couldn’t have been less so). The sexual revolution was in full swing – you didn’t have to take classes to see naked women. He certainly didn’t. He just wanted to learn to draw.

One evening he came home and reported that the teacher had given a brilliant instruction that allowed him to make a real breakthrough.  What the teacher had said was this: 

Don’t draw the figure, draw what’s not there.  Draw the negative space around the subject.

In social science too, the solution to a problem sometimes starts with thinking about the part that isn’t there.

For a simple example, the first assignment in my intro class for majors asks them to look at a map showing the distribution of some variable, their choice, among the 50 states and explain what’s going on. One student chose Older People – the percentage of people 65 and up. We were using 2000 Census data. This map of 2010 is not much different.

The student was puzzled. She guessed correctly that Florida would be number one. But what were these other states doing in the top ten – West Virginia, the Dakotas, Arkansas?  Were old people retiring to these places and not telling anyone? And if so, why? I showed the map to the entire class, and they too couldn’t come up with an explanation.

So I reminded them that there’s more than one way for a state to have a relatively high rate of older people. The retirees can move in. That accounts for Florida. But what if all the young people move out? The map title doesn’t say “Young Adults Leaving,” or “Youth Deserts,” but maybe that’s what it’s showing. When students turned their attention to this “negative space” around the variable – the behavior of the young rather than the old –  the map made sense. They could come up with lots of reasons for the why people their age might not want to stay in those states.

A similar idea occurred to me yesterday when I read a brief report in Le Figaro about preferred sex positions among Europeans.* It was the last paragraph that reminded me of the life-drawing lesson. 

One third of women who earn 2500 euros a month or more practice The Andromache  [woman on top], twice as many as women who earn less than 2500 euros a month.  [In dollars, that dividing point is about $40,000 a year.]

How do you explain this difference? (Forget for the moment that the survey, done for a dating website, has methodological problems and take the finding at face value.) My first thought was that higher-income women might be more independent and thus less willing to be weighed down by a man. They would be more assertive, less subservient – the cliche carryover from boardroom to bedroom.  

Or was I looking at the wrong part of the picture?  It takes two to make The Andromache, and maybe we should be thinking not about the women but about the people who Le Figaro left out of that sentence – men.  Assuming that higher-income women have partners who are also educated and better off, maybe we’re looking the desires of upscale men.  (The phrasing of the sentence in Le Figaro is curious. The earlier parts of the article are about what women prefer, and this paragraph starts out referring to women’s “favorite” position, but this sentence uses the verb pratiquer rather than préférer.  And I have not been able to find the actual results of the survey.)  Perhaps as you go up the social class ladder, men are less bound by stereotypical male-dominant gender roles and more willing to suggest and try a greater variety of positions and practices.**  

That’s pure speculation on my part.  I don’t know the research on social class and sexual preferences and practices. 

Are there other cases where a problem becomes clearer when we turn our attention to the negative space? In a sense, this is what sociology often does. Where conventional thinking focuses on the behavior of the individual, sociology turns its attention to the external forces of the situations those people inhabit. Most of the time, just as our eyes shift naturally to something that is moving, our attention goes to the behavior of the individual. That is the figure we focus on. It’s much harder to turn our attention to the space around that figure. 

In life drawing, once we have the insight and shift our gaze, drawing the background is not much different from drawing the figure. But art is visual. Social science is more verbal. We have a rich vocabulary for describing people’s actions. But when it comes to describing situational pressures, we’re often at a loss for words. 

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 * HT: Xavier Molénat, whose tweet took me to this story.

** There’s also the idea of the boardroom-bedroom antithesis – that men in positions of power find release by becoming the powerless one in bed (“Mad Men” went in for this idea at the start of Season 4).  Both explanations locate cause in the workplace.  One says that for women, assertive at work leads to assertive in bed; the other says that for men, on top at work leads to on the bottom in bed.  I’m skeptical of both, though I do not know of the research in this area.

College Costs - The International Perspective

June 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

American students grumble when their universities raise tuition fees.  But in France and the UK, students take to the streets.  The lesson, I suppose, is that we compare ourselves to what we know, and while students know what their tuition was last year, they have no idea about tuition in other countries. 

Business Insider has some data to correct that ignorance.  As in so many other the USA is number one in absolute terms, with an average cost of nearly $14,000.  Relative to median income, two countries – Japan and Mexico – have college costs that are less affordable.  (As Business Insider points out, there’s a huge difference in the US between public and private universities.)

In 2008, French students protested Sarkozy’s proposed cuts to education.  I’m not sure they framed the issue as a return on what they were paying – $585.

Of course, they did have to suffer the hardship of living in cities like Paris and eating French food.
The protests in the UK are more understandable.  When the Conservative government proposed a tuition increase, 50,000 demonstrators took to the streets of London.

The increase would have put UK costs on a par with the US average (though much less than the costs of private universities in the US ).  

For the Business Insider snapshots of education costs in sixteen countries, go here. No doubt, the simple numbers obscure some other variables that might be considered in assessing the real costs of college.   But the numbers do give a rough idea.

Public Goods and Individual Mandates

June 10, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images



My son and his girlfriend arrived in Beijing ten days ago.  The got-here-safely e-mail ended with this:

was blown away by the pollution! I know people
talk about it all the time, but it really is crazy.

And it is.  Here’s a photo I grabbed from the Internet.

At about the same time, I came upon a this link to photos of my home town Pittsburgh in 1940.  Here are two of them.

Today in downtown Pittsburgh, the streetcars and overhead trolleys are gone.  So are the fedoras.  And so is the smoke.  

The air became cleaner in the years following the end of the War.  It didn’t become clean all by itself, and it didn’t become clean because of free-market forces.  It got clean because of government – legislation and regulation, including an individual mandate. 

The smoke was caused by the burning of coal, and while the steel mills accounted for some of the smoke, much of the it came from coal-burning furnaces in Pittsburghers’ houses.  If the city was to have cleaner air, the government would have to force people change the way they heated their homes.  And that is exactly what the law did. To create a public good – clean air – the law required individuals to purchase something – either non-polluting fuel (oil, gas, or smokeless coal) or smokeless equipment.* 

Initially, not everyone favored smoke control, but as Pittsburgh became cleaner and lost its “Smoky City” label, approval of the regulations increased, and there was a fairly rapid transition to gas heating.  By the 1950s, nobody longed for the unregulated air of 1940.  Smoke control was a great success.**  Of course, it may have helped that Pittsburgh did not have a major opposition party railing against this government takeover of home heating or claiming that smoke control was a jobs-killing assault on freedom.

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* Enforcement focused not on individuals but distributors.  Truckers were forbidden from delivering the wrong kind of coal.

** For a fuller account of smoke control in Pittsburgh, see Joel A. Tarr and Bill C. Lamperes, Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950: A Case Study in Historical Analogy. Journal of Social History , Vol. 14, No. 4, Special Issue on Applied History (Summer, 1981), pp. 561-588.

Does Washington Weigh on Washington?

June 7, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Will Obama’s coming out for gay marriage swing a referendum in Washington state?

Gay marriage in Washington state is only four months old, but the straights-only forces are trying to nip it in the bud and at the ballot box.  They have filed petitions to let a simple majority of voters decide who has the right to marry.  This strategy has worked in the other states, where hetero majorities have consistently voted keep the gay minority out of their marriage club.

The Times story notes that in Washington it’s not clear which side is in the majority. The article cites surveys and previous voting. But then it adds,

President Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage rights last month is probably the biggest new variable in a state that he won handily in 2008 and where he still had a 54 percent approval rating in a poll released last week by Strategies 360. [emphasis added]

Is Obama’s support a big variable?

Surveys taken before and after showed  Obama’s announcement of his own “evolution” having no effect on White voters. It may have had some influence among Black voters, where support for gay marriage increased by nearly 20 points – from 41% to 59%.  That shift should be interpreted cautiously since the number of African Americans in the sample was not large. Even so, African Americans are only 3.6% of the Washington state population, and their percentage among voters may be even smaller  - more reason to question the weight of the Obama variable

Also, as Nate Silver says on his FiveThirtyEight blog at the Times, that effect may dissipate over time.  

For Democrats who oppose gay marriage, the issue now becomes a classic example of “cross pressure.”* Obama’s statement may make that pressure especially felt among African Americans. As Jon Bernstein at WaPo put it,

people who are on Team Church and Team Democrat now realize that those two are in conflict and they have to choose, while before they were getting only one signal.

The beauty of the ballot measure for the ant-gay-marriage forces is that cross-pressured voters do not have to choose. They can split the issues and vote for the Democratic candidate but against gay-marriage. That option makes any possible Obama effect even more feathery and ephemeral.

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* This was a topic of an early post on this blog (here), and although that post was about Republicans, Bernstein’s “Team Church” reinforces the relevance of that post’s title (one of my favorites): “The Old Rugged Cross-Pressure.”

Blaming the Media II

June 3, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

If a person thinks that the media are infiltrating his mind and controlling his thoughts and behavior, we consider him a nutjob, and we recommend professional help and serious meds. But if a person thinks that the media are infiltrating other people’s minds and affecting their behavior, we call him or her an astute social observer, one eminently qualified to give speeches or write op-eds.   

The previous post dwelt on economist Isabel Sawhill’s WaPo op-ed channeling Dan Quayle, particularly Quayle’s speech asserting that a TV sitcom was wielding a strong effect on people’s decisions – not just decisions like Pepsi vs. Coke, but decisions like whether to have a baby. 

That was Quayle, this is now.  Still, our current vice-president can sometimes resemble his counterpart of two decades ago.  Just last month, Joe Biden echoed the Quayle idea on the power of sitcoms.  On “Meet the Press,” in response to David Gregory’s question about gay marriage, Biden said that “this is evolving” and added:

And by the way, my measure, David, and I take a look at when things really begin to change, is when the social culture changes.  I think “Will and Grace” probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody’s ever done so far.

“Will and Grace” ran for eight seasons, 1998 - 2006.  Its strongest years were 2001-2005, when it was the top rated show among the 18-49 crowd. If asked for systematic evidence, Biden could have pointed to GSS data on the gay marriage question.  In 1988, ten years before “Will and Grace,” when the GSS asked about gay marriage, only 12% supported it, 73% opposed it.  In 2004, six years into the W+G era, support had more than doubled, and it continued to rise in subsequent years.

(Click on a graph for a larger view.)

Because the gay marriage question was asked only in those two years, 1988 and 2004, we don’t know just when in that 16-year period, 1988 - 2004, things “really began to change.”  Fortunately, the GSS more regularly asked the respondent’s view on sexual relations between same-sex partners.  Here too, tolerance grows in the “Will and Grace” period (gray on the graph).

The trouble is that graph is misleading. To see the error, all we need do is extend our sampling back a few years  Here is the same graph starting in 1973.

The GSS shows attitudes about homosexuality starting to change in 1990.  By the time of the first episode of “Will and Grace” in 1998, the proportion seeing nothing wrong with homosexuality had already doubled.  Like Quayle’s “Murphy Brown” effect, the “Will and Grace” effect is hard to see.

The flaw in the Quayle-Biden method is not in mistaking TV for reality.  It’s in assuming that the public’s awareness is simultaneous with their own. 

But why do our vice-presidents (and many other people) give so much credit (or blame) to a popular TV show for a change in public opinion? The error is partly a simplistic post hoc logic.  “Will and Grace” gave us TV’s first gay principal character; homosexuality became more acceptable.  Murphy Brown was TV’s first happily unwed mother, and in the following years, single motherhood increased.  Cause - Effect.  Besides, we know that these shows are watched by millions of people each week. So it must be the show that is causing the change. 

It’s also possible that our vice-presidents (and many other people) may also have been projecting their own experiences onto the general public.  Maybe Murphy Brown was the first or only unwed mother that Dan Quayle really knew – or at least she was the one he knew best. It’s possible that Joe Biden wasn’t familiar with any gay men, not in the way we feel we know TV characters.  A straight guy might have some gay acquaintances or co-workers, but it’s the fictional Will Truman whose private life he could see, if only for a half hour every week.

Does TV matter?  When we think about our own decisions, we are much more likely to focus on our experiences and on the pulls and pushes of family, work, and friends.  We generally don’t attribute much causal weight to the sitcoms we watch.  Why then are we so quick to see these shows as having a profound influence on other people’s behavior, especially behavior we don’t like?  Maybe because it’s such an easy game to play.  Is there more unwed motherhood?  Must be “Murphy Brown.”  Did obesity increase in the 1990s?  “Roseanne.”  Are twentysomethings and older delaying marriage?  “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” And of course “The Simpsons,” at least Bart and Homer, who can be held responsible for a variety of social ills.

Blaming the Media I

June 2, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

I’m not sure what effect prime-time sitcoms have on the general public.  Very little, I suspect, but I don’t know the literature on the topic. Still, it’s surprising how many people with a similar lack of knowledge assume that the effect is large and usually for the worse.

Isabel Sawhill, is a serious researcher at Brookings; her areas are poverty and inequality.  Now, in a Washington Post article, she, says that Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown. 

Some quick history for those who were out of the room – or hadn’t yet entered the room: In 1992, Dan Quayle was vice-president under Bush I.  Murphy Brown was the title character on a popular sitcom then its fourth season – a divorced TV news anchor played by Candice Bergen.  On the show, she got pregnant.  When the father, her ex, refused to remarry her, she decided to have the baby and raise it on her own. 

Dan Quayle, in his second most famous moment,* gave a campaign speech about family values that included this:

Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong . . . . Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. . . . It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.

Sawhill, citing her own research and that of others, argues that Quayle was right about families:  children raised by married parents are better off in many ways – health, education, income, and other measures of well-being – than are children raised by unmarried parents whether single or together.** 

But Sawhill also says that Quayle was right about the more famous part of the statement – that “Murphy Brown” was partly to blame for the rise in nonmarried parenthood.

Dan Quayle was right. Unless the media, parents and other influential leaders celebrate marriage as the best environment for raising children, the new trend — bringing up baby alone — may be irreversible.  

Sawhill, following Quayle, gives pride of place to the media.  But unfortunately, she cites no evidence on the effects of sitcoms or the media in general on unwed parenthood.  I did, however, find this graph of unwed motherhood (here). It shows the percent of all babies that were born to unmarried mothers.  I have added a vertical line to indicate the Murphy Brown moment.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

The “Murphy Brown” effect is, at the very least, hard to detect. The rise is general across all racial groups, including those who were probably not watching a sitcom whose characters were all white and well-off.  Also, the trend begins well before “Murphy Brown” ever saw the light of prime time.  So 1992, with Murphy Brown’s fateful decision, was no more a turning point than was 1986, for example, a year when the two top TV shows were “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties,” sitcoms with a very low rate of single parenthood and, at least for “Cosby,” a more inclusive demographic.

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  * Quayle’s most remembered moment: when a schoolboy wrote “potato” on the blackboard, Quayle “corrected” him by getting him to add a final “e” – “potatoe.”  “There you go,” said the vice-president of the United States approvingly. (A 15-second video is here.) Is anyone claiming a sudden drop in the spelling competence of America subsequent to the vice-president’s gaffe?

** These results are not surprising.  Compared with other wealthy countries, the US does less to support poor children and families or to ease the deleterious effects on children who have been so foolhardy as to choose poor, unmarried parents.

Heroes

May 29, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you die in uniform, are you automatically a hero? 

On Memorial Day, the day for honoring our war dead, MSNBC newsman Chris Hayes said he had reservations about the way the word hero gets tossed around.  Some soldiers, he said, die in circumstances of  “tremendous heroism.”  But that implied that other soldiers deaths are not quite as heroic and that not all dead military personnel are heroes. 

Hayese also questioned the whole enterprise of hero-making.

I feel uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.

As you would expect, the right wing swung into full battle vituperation, with the usual name calling – commie, collectivist, intellectual, effete – that tells us more about the fears of the name-callers than it does about Hayes.  (Politico has a summary of the reaction.)

Above all, the critics insisted that the military dead were, ipso facto, heroes.

Whether all are heroes comes down to definitions, and apparently some people’s definition of hero includes all dead soldiers.  More important is Hayes’s discomfort at the motives and the effect of all this hero-mongering: “justification for more war.” It’s sometimes called “waving the bloody shirt.” 

A way to think about this is to imagine other nations or groups doing something similar.  Imagine Al Qaeda, for example, having hero ceremonies for their own dead, saying what heroes all these dead Al Qaeda are and how wonderful and worthwhile their sacrifice.   Might we suspect that the motive behind these sentiments was to stir their followers to further acts of war? 


Imagine a Pakistani newsman saying that this waving of the bloody headscarf, despite the honorable motive of honoring the dead,  seemed to encourage even more war, more killing, and more death.  Would we think maybe he had a point?  Or would we say, “How dare he suggest that some of these fallen Al Qaeda were not heroes?” and then dismiss him as cowardly, effeminate, and disloyal?

Boosters and Bigots

May 27, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A commenter on the previous post equates Blacks who voted for Obama because of his race with Whites who voted against Obama because of his race. (This paraphrase cannot capture the tone of the comment, which should be read in its entirety.) If we phrase the issue that way, the equation is undeniable.  It’s practically a tautology.  Both are voting on the basis of race rather than policy.

But most people would see a difference – a difference between for and against, a difference between hope and fear, a difference between the desire for inclusion and the demand for exclusion, a difference between liking one of us and disliking (even hating) all of them. 

A minority group voting for one of theirs – especially the first time one of theirs has ever had the nomination of a major party – is different from a majority group voting against a candidate because of his minority status.  In 1960, 80% of Catholics voters supported John F. Kennedy – about 17 percentage points more than a non-Catholic would have gotten.  Most people (though apparently not the commenter) would not equate those Catholic voters with the anti-Catholics who voted against Kennedy because of his religion.  If a Jew is ever nominated, most people (though apparently not the commenter) would not equate his Jewish supporters with the anti-Semites who would vote against any and all Jews.  Most people understand the difference between a booster and a bigot.

In the case of Obama, the pro- and anti- votes are different not just in quality but also in quantity.  The 96% of the Black vote did not give Obama such a huge bump.

That Black vote for Obama was only six points higher than the Black vote for Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore.  (I was surprised that Clinton, “the first Black president,” got a lower percent of the Black votes than did these other candidates. )  That six-point boost is also much less than the anti-Black vote revealed in the map and graphs in the previous post.

Racism and Mind Reading

May 24, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images


In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote.  The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like “uncommitted” (Kentucky), an unknown lawyer (Arkansas), and a man who is incarcerated in Texas (West Virginia).

Could it be that there’s racism at work in Appalachia?  Or is the anti-Obama vote based entirely on opposition to his policies? 

The 2008 Presidential election – Obama v. McCain – offers some hints.  For those with short memories, the Bush legacy – an unpopular war and an economic catastrophe – may have hurt the GOP.  In that election, the country went Democratic. The Democrats did better than they had in 2004, the Republicans worse.  But not everywhere. The Times provides this map:

(Click on the map for a larger view.)

Most counties were more Democratic in 2008 than in 2004.  But in that Appalachian arc, Obama got fewer votes than had Kerry in 2004.  Yes, it’s possible that those voters in Appalachia preferred the policies of candidate Kerry to those of candidate Obama.  As Chris Cilizza says in in a Washington Post blog (here), the idea that race had anything to do with this shift is

almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

Cilizza quotes Cornell Belcher, the head of a polling firm with the Monkish name Brilliant Corners:

One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.

Right. The folks in Appalachia preferred John Kerry’s culture.

I’m generally cautious about attributing mental characteristics to people based on a single bit of behavior.  But David Weigel, in Slate, goes back to the 2008 Democratic primaries – Obama versus Hillary Clinton.  A CNN exit poll asked voters if race was an important factor in their vote. In West Virginia and Kentucky, about 20% of the voters in the Democratic primary said yes.  Were those admittedly race-conscious voters more anti-Obama than other Democrats?

Clinton outpolled Obama among all primary voters in these two states.  But among those who said race was important, she did much better.  Race added another 20 points to her lead.  Or to put it another way,  Race-important took away half the Obama vote.  As Weigel points out, this was before Obama took office, before voters really knew what policies he would propose.  Besides, there wasn’t all that much difference in his policies and those of Hillary Clinton.

Cilizza is right that we can’t read voters’ minds.  But to argue that there was no racial motivation, you have to discount what the voters said and what they did.

Acknowledgments

May 23, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is it an homage, or is it an outright ripoff?  That’s often hard to know, and maybe the difference lies not in the work itself but in whether the artist acknowledges the link.  In academic writing, we can be explicit – “As So-and-so pointed out in 1972 . . .” – and we can footnote scrupulously.   Or not.

But in the arts, a performer cannot stop the show and acknowledge the others whose material he is reworking or just plain copying.  (One of this blog’s first posts (here) was about the problem of plagiarism in comedy and magic.  ) 

Not long after, I ran across a short story in The New Yorker (Kate Walbert’s “Playdate”) that seemed, to me at least, clearly based on J. D. Salinger’s 1948 story in The New Yorker, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” Homage or ripoff, I wondered at the time (here).

This week’s New Yorker brings us this opening to a short story by Lorrie Moore.

For the third time in three years, they talked about what would be a suitable birthday present for her deranged son.  There was so little they were actually allowed to bring; almost everything could be transformed into a weapon, and so most items had to be left at the front desk and the, if requested, brought in later by a big blonde aide, who would look the objects over beforehand for their wounding possibilities.  Pete had brought a basked of jams, but they were in glass jars, and so not permitted. “I forgot about that,” he said.  The jars were arranged by color, from the brightest marmalade to cloudberry to fig, as if they contained the urine tests of an increasingly ill person.  Just as well they’ll be confiscated, she thought. They would find something else to bring.

Moore makes no attempt to hide her source, though she cannot add footnotes (she’s not David Foster Wallace, and anyway that’s not the kind of footnotes he used).  To anyone vaguely familiar with Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols,” published in The New Yorker in 1948, the similarity is unmistakable.  Here is Nabokov’s opening paragraph.

For the fourth time in as many years, they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to take to a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind. Desires he had none. Man-made objects were to him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the gadget line, for instance, was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle—a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars.

(The full text of the story is here.)

Moore even gives her story the title “Referential,” a double (at least) meaning. In the Nabokov story, the son’s delusions are a form of “referential mania.”

“Referential mania,” the article had called it. In these very rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.

And of course, Moore’s story, from beginning to end, is referential, if not reverential, to Nabokov’s. 

Milestone

May 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday’s post was the SocioBlog’s 1000th entry.  The blog took its first baby steps into cyberspace on September 20, 2006.  Here we are, 68 months and 1000 posts later. 

Thanks for reading.

They Work Hard for a Ton of Money

May 21, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m not very good at looking at a scatterplot and estimating the correlation. 

This morning’s Wall Street Journal had a front-page story  about CEO pay.  Here’s the lede:

Chief executives increasingly are being paid based on their companies' financial results and share prices, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

The WSJ even had an outside source check their calculations and conclusions.

Pay was “highly correlated with performance,” says Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business who reviewed the Journal calculations.

Here’s the scatterplot showing the 300 largest companies:

(Click on the chart for a larger view.  Those wedge-shaped lines point to
very large photographs of individual CEOs, which I cropped out.)

I guess “highly correlated” is a term of art.  Unfortunately, the WSJ does not provide a regression line or correlation coefficient, but apparently the slope is +0.6.

On average, for every additional 1% a company returned to shareholders between 2009 and 2011, the CEO was paid 0.6% more last year, the analysis found. For every 1% decline in shareholder return, the CEO was paid 0.6% less.

I like that idea of considering the profitable CEOs separately from the CEOs whose firms lost money.  Here is the same scatterplot split down the middle. 

If you divide the Pay axis at $20 million, the relation becomes clear.  For every $20M+ CEO in a losing company, there are three in profitable companies. 

But here’s where my inability to look at the dots and estimate correlations messes me up.  To me, it looks as though among the losing firms, there’s no relation between CEO pay and how well the company did (i.e., how small its losses).  Same thing on the profit side, especially if you ignore the three $60M+ outliers.  (Timothy Cook of Apple, at $378M, lies out so far he’s not even on the chart.)  

I’m not sure to who to believe – the Wall Street Journal or my lyin’ eyes. 
The WSJ site has a chart listing the compensation of all 300 – from Apple down to Whole Foods, whose CEO didn’t even snag $1 million.

The story also heralds 2011 as showing huge improvement over the previous year in rationality, or at least the proportionality of pay to profits,

In 2010, there was no correlation; for every 1% decrease in shareholder return, the average CEO was paid 0.02% more.

Yes, you read that correctly.  The correlation was negative  – the smaller the profit (or larger the loss), the higher the CEO pay. 

She Works Hard For No Money

May 20, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross posted at Sociological Images

The politics of motherhood reared its head again last month when Hilary Rosen, who the news identified as a “Democratic strategist,” said that Ann Romney (Mrs. Mitt) had “never worked a day in her life.” (A NY Times article is here.)

“Worked” was a bad choice of words.  Raising kids and taking care of a home are work, maybe even if you can hire the kind of help that Mrs. Romney could afford.  Rosen’s comment implied that family work is not as worthwhile as work in the paid labor force.  That’s not such an unreasonable conclusion if you assume that we put our money where our values are and reward work in proportion to what we think it’s worth.  Mitt’s supporters use this value-to-society assumption to justify the huge payoffs Romney derived from those leveraged buyouts at Bain Capital.*

Even Mrs. Romney apparently felt that there must be some truth to the enviability of a career.   Why else would she refer to stay-at-home motherhood as a career?  “My career choice was to be a mother.”

Still, regardless of the truth of Rosen’s remark, it was insulting.**  Stay-at-home motherhood is work – a job. 

But is it a good job? 

A recent Gallup poll provides some more evidence as to why stay-at-home moms might be both envious or resentful of their employed counterparts.  Gallup asked women about the emotions, positive and negative, that they had felt “a lot” in the previous day.  Gallup then compared the stay-at-home moms, employed moms, and employed women who had no children at home. 

The stay-at-home moms came in first on every negative emotion.  Some of the differences are small, but the Gallup sample was more than 60,000 so these differences are statistically significant.   The smallest difference was for Stress – no surprise there, since paid work can be stressful.  Worry and Anger too can be part of the workplace.  The largest differences were for Sadness and Depression.  Stay-home moms were 60% more likely to have been sad or depressed. 

Gallup also asked about positive feelings (Thriving, Smiling or Laughing, Learning, Happiness, Enjoyment), and while the differences were smaller, they went the same way, with stay-at-home moms on the shorter end.  Still it’s encouraging that 86% of them had Experienced Happiness 86%; so had 91% of the employed moms.

Money matters.  As Rosen said,

This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.

Gallup found a small interaction effect.  The stay-at-home mom-employed difference was greater for low-income women.

The Gallup poll does not offer much speculation about why stay-at-home moms have more sadness and less happiness. One in four experienced “a lot” of depression yesterday.  That number should be cause for concern.

Maybe women feel more uncertain and less able to control their lives when they depend on a man, especially one whose income is inadequate.  Maybe stay-at-home moms find themselves more isolated from other adults. Maybe they are at home not by choice but because they cannot find a decent-paying job. Or maybe money talks, and what it says to unpaid stay-at-home moms is society does not value your work.  Nor, in comparison with other wealthy countries, does US society or government provide much non-financial support to make motherhood easier.

The late Donna Summer sang,

She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

But how right are we treating women who work hard for no money?

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* For example, Edward Conrad is a former partner of Romney.  In a recent article in the Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes, “If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conrad says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefitted society.”

** Hillary Clinton committed a similar gaffe twenty years ago in response to a reporter’s question about work and family “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life”

The Glee of Fielding

May 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Wednesday night I had just finished The Art of Fielding.  I closed the book, thought about it for a few moments, and then for some reason I decided to watch “Glee.”  I’ve seen the show only a few times; when I do watch, it’s to see and hear which songs are being covered.  

In one of the first posts in this blog, I watched “Friday Night Lights” and wondered why so many American fictions culminate in some kind of contest or competition that magically resolves or dissolves all problems.  Internal personal troubles, moral dilemmas, social problems, interpersonal conflicts, romantic uncertainties – it all comes down to the big game. And once that’s over, win or lose, everything falls into place. 

Fielding and “Glee” both draw on this theme, though Fielding, a 500-page novel, has much more going on than does a 44-minute TV episode.  They also  trot out the same cliche of the underdog.   McKinley is always going up against a much more affluent, successful, and perhaps talented glee club that looks down their noses at our heroes.  In the championship game in Fielding, the struggling college baseball team meet the well-heeled Amherst, who arrive complete with mean-girl cheerleaders.

“Glee” and Fielding reprise another theme common in American fictions.  It combines “It’s Your Decision”  with “Taking One for the Team.”  A character’s conflict with another member of the team, or perhaps his struggle with his own internal demons, is jeopardizing the team’s chances for success against some powerful and nasty opponent.   Others drop hints, but nobody tells our hero what to do – this is America, after all, and individualism means that each person decides for himself.  But in the end, he or she sacrifices self-based motives and helps the team win (or if they lose, to do so admirably and with nobility). 

The more powerful opponent can be a sports team, a glee club, a gang, a political organization, or even, as in Casablanca, Hitler and the Axis powers.  In the end, Bogart (Rick) sacrifices his love for Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa) in favor of the war effort.  He takes one for the team.  As he explains to  Ilsa at the end on the tarmac,

It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.*

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* As Michael Wood  has pointed out, Bogart here is repeating precisely the idea that Bergman has been trying to convince him of since she arrived in Casablanca

The Mirror of Privilege

May 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Privilege is invisible . . . to the privileged, though often not to others.  In the past (here for example ), I’ve used the analogy of “default setting.”   White, Christian, males assume that this is the default setting.  It’s  natural – it’s the way Nature thinks things ought to be. 

John Scalzi does a much better job with the default analogy.  He’s trying to get White males to look in the mirror without their invisibility cloaks and see their own privilege. 

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US . . . is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. . . . Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

(Read Scalzi’s entire post here.)

I don’t know if his strategy will work.  The privileged man stands in front of one of those distorting carnival mirrors.  He sees his legs and feet of privilege, but they are tiny.  The shoulders and head of his own accomplishment are gigantic.

I keep thinking of Molly Ivins’s line about George W. Bush – that “he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”*

A more recent example comes from the Romney clan.  Mitt himself was born to privilege and then made a ton of money. But he probably does not realize how being the son of a wealthy father, one who had been governor of Michigan and who could send him to fancy schools, had anything to do with his success.

And now the next generation.

Shortly after Mitt Romney's failed 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination his son Tagg set up a private equity fund with the campaign’s top fundraiser. One of the first donors was his mum, Anne. Next came several of his dad's financial backers. Tagg had no experience in the world of finance, but after two years in the middle of a deep recession the company had netted $244m from just 64 investors.

Tagg insists that neither his name nor the fact that his father had made it clear he would run for the presidency again had anything to do with his success. “The reason people invested in us is that they liked our strategies,” he told the New York Times. [emphasis added]

Want a good example of how privilege is invisible to the privileged? – Tagg, you’re it.

The excerpt is from an article in The Guardian  by Gary Younge.  Younge’s real target is not young Tagg but people in the UK who, despite their best efforts, keep having their names crop up in connection with the Murdoch phone hacking scandal. 

Such is the incestuous nature of the British ruling class and the gene puddle from which it draws its stock. Such is their brazen venality, complicity, contempt and mendacity. Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon, Westminster – if you’re looking for a tiny minority who are struggling to integrate, look no further than the cabinet.

This is not to say that class in the US is the same as in the UK.  But in both countries, although personal ties to well-placed people are important, those who use those connections to become wealthy and still more wealthy attribute their success to their own personal virtue. 

-----------------
* Ivins has come up with the perfect simile.  If you’re on third, you are very close to scoring – all by yourself.  And of all baseball hits, a triple is the rarest.

France Politics: Pomp and Ceremony. Family – Not So Much

May 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

File this under “differences in political culture” (or “The French just don’t know how to do these things.”) 

François Hollande was sworn into office yesterday as President of France. 

Hollande invited just three dozen or so private guests to join the 350 officials at the event. His partner, political journalist Valérie Trierweiler, was present, but their children were not. (From The Guardian)

The halftime shows at French university soccer matches probably aren’t anything to write home about either. Don’t they get the idea of cheerleaders? 

Also note that Mme. Trierweiler is “partner,” not wife.  And by the way, those four absent children Hollande had with Ségolène Royal were all born out of wedlock.  President Hollande has never had a marriage or even a civil union. 

Can we imagine an American politician with similar family values being similarly successful – especially one whose platform included, as did Hollande’s, the “moralization” of politics?*

 -----------------------
* I know, I know – Newt Gingrich, with his multiple wives and adulteries and his request for an “open” marriage.   His loyal supporters were willing to forgive and forget, and they cheered when Newt excoriated the press for asking him about it.  But his campaign for the GOP nomination was hardly a success.

Old Men and “My Old Man”

May 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I could never get away with that with my old man.”

I’ve blogged before (here) about the myth of the authoritarian past – the idea that in some ideal past, back before Hip Hop (now), or before Rock ‘n’ Roll (1960s), or before the automobile (1920s), or . . . kids were more respectful of their elders. 

The nostalgia goes back farther than that.  Kieran Healy  digs out his Latin copy of Livy’s history of Rome, and finds the historian bemoaning the lack of respect for elders.

This is due to the cheapened and diminished authority even of parents over their children in our day.  

Livy, on the cusp of BC/AD, was writing about a war 200 years earlier.  That’s a little while before Paul Lynde in “Bye-Bye Birdie (ca. 1960) was singing “Kids, they are disobedient, disrespectful oafs.”

This nostalgia for a non-existent authoritarian past mistakes personal change for social change.  Livy and Lynde remember the past as more authoritarian – when grown-ups were men of power that you didn’t mess around with – because they are remembering the past from their point-of-view at the time. They were children then, and from their perspective, a father was indeed a powerful figure to be feared and respected. They stood 4' 3" or so; they literally had to look up to their fathers.* 

But as grown-ups, they live in a more complicated world where they cannot control everything – not the choices of the younger men, not even the desires, abilities, and flaws of their own small children. 

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*This post is more appropriate for Father’s Day rather than Mother’s Day.  But the same principle of nostalgia applies to softer sentiments as well – community instead of authority.  (My post on that is here).  But Happy Mother’s Day anyway.

Gay Rights Graphic

May 11, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

As the graph in yesterday’s post showed, support for gay marriage  is not uniform across age groups.  There is also wide variation by region and state in the laws on marriage and other matters.
The Guardian had a great graphic on gay rights in the 50 states.  Here’s a screen grab.

(Click on the image for a larger version.  Better, follow the link below to the original.)

For the full interactive version, go to The Guardian (here).  As you mouse across each state, it shows the details in the seven categories.  In the version above, the size of each state’s wedge is proportionate to its population.  But you can switch to an equal size version.

The Guardian has also published an article showing how they developed the graphic.