December 12, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
After a protest against the president, a student Website carried a statement that included the following: “The students showed that despite vast propaganda, the president has not been able to deceive academia.”
The students had shouted down the president, set fire to photos of him, threw firecrackers, and chanted, “Death to the dictator,” and kicked at the car in which he made his premature departure.
Nevertheless, according to the story in the Times, “The guards did not remove the students or use force to stop the protests,” although students at the protest were certain that some of the counter-demonstrators supporting the president were shills bused in by the Administration.
You’ve probably caught on by now that this was not in the US. (That “death to the dictator” is a giveaway. American protesters don’t call for death to anyone. Well, sometimes there are demonstrations in favor of capital punishment and the execution of particular criminals, but aside from those . . . ) And of course there's no way that US protestors could have come even close to within kicking distance of the president's limo.
The protest was in Iran, and the president was the somewhat loony Ahmadinejad.
The story seems like some bizarro mirror of reactions here to our own president and issues of free speech. But what if it had been the US? What if students at a university speech by President Bush had protested like this? Any chance that the guards wouldn’t use force to clear the protesters out? And is it possible that the administration, given advance warning of a protest, might bring in outside counterdemonstrators?
I’m not sure what the sociological moral of the story is. And I don’t mean to imply that students in Tehran are freer than their US counterparts. In fact, Ahmadinejad, as the Times reports, has “cracked down on dissent.” But the incident, and our reactions to it, may have some relevance for our own debates about free speech on campus.
Not Like the Others vs. Just Like the Others
December 9, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Can someone please explain the rules about formal dress?
The news story out of Washington yesterday was that at a White House reception on Sunday, three women wore the same dress. Four actually. The fourth was the first lady. Television reports spliced together a montage of the three women arriving, each escorted by a man in a tuxedo, and then Mrs. Bush in the same dress, a red Oscar de la Renta number th
at goes for $8500.
Under the circumstances, Mrs. Bush felt compelled to slip upstairs and into something else. If the other three women had been near their own walk-in closets, they would probably have done the same thing. Or at least two of them would have. But why?
Why is it so terrible for two or three or four women to be wearing the same dress? The news reporters assumed that we knew and did not explain. Nor did any of the reports even mention that all the men — not just two or three, but all of them — were wearing nearly identical outfits. Black tuxedos with white shirts and black ties. Clumped together at the White House reception, these plumpish, successful men looked like a colony of penguins. The women at the party, though many wore black, could choose all kinds of colors — Dolly Parton was in white, Shania Twain in a print. But if a man had arrived in some color other than black— a seasonal red or green for example— he might well have been denied admission.
The rules are clear:
Men – same style , no colors
Women — unique style; all colors
Obviously these rules say something about gender, but what? That women have nothing better to do than to spend their time shopping for one-of-a-kind clothes while men are so busy they don’t have time to think about the matter? But that doesn’t explain the analogous pattern in names. Women don’t want themselves or their daughters to have names that are too common, and fashions in names for women, just like fashions in clothing, change much more rapidly than do men’s (to check name popularity, go here).
Why don’t we feel the same way about the names and clothes that men wear? The men-in-black requirement is especially interesting, at least to me. Once, to a friend’s wedding, I wore a deep blue dinner jacket instead of a tux, and I’m not sure if the family has ever forgiven me. Hey, it was summer in the 70s.
It wasn’t always like this. Go back two centuries or so, to the court of King George III rather than Bush George the Second, and you might think you’d stumbled into an Elton John
theme party. Of course, even in the 18th century, women’s dress had greater variety than did men’s, but at least a guy could wear color. In this picture, which makes fun of the difficulties women encountered just to get into their gowns, the man is in bright red, and the maid (?) is in blue. (I'm not sure if the neutral-colored garment being laced up is the final layer or merely an undergarment.)
The rules of formal dress, just like preferences in names, probably also vary by social class and (at least in the US) race. Levitt and Dubner, the Freakanomics guys, maintain that changes in names (at least among whites in the US) filter down through the social class structure, starting from the top. What about fashions?
Posted by Jay Livingston
Can someone please explain the rules about formal dress?
The news story out of Washington yesterday was that at a White House reception on Sunday, three women wore the same dress. Four actually. The fourth was the first lady. Television reports spliced together a montage of the three women arriving, each escorted by a man in a tuxedo, and then Mrs. Bush in the same dress, a red Oscar de la Renta number th
at goes for $8500.Under the circumstances, Mrs. Bush felt compelled to slip upstairs and into something else. If the other three women had been near their own walk-in closets, they would probably have done the same thing. Or at least two of them would have. But why?
Why is it so terrible for two or three or four women to be wearing the same dress? The news reporters assumed that we knew and did not explain. Nor did any of the reports even mention that all the men — not just two or three, but all of them — were wearing nearly identical outfits. Black tuxedos with white shirts and black ties. Clumped together at the White House reception, these plumpish, successful men looked like a colony of penguins. The women at the party, though many wore black, could choose all kinds of colors — Dolly Parton was in white, Shania Twain in a print. But if a man had arrived in some color other than black— a seasonal red or green for example— he might well have been denied admission.
The rules are clear:
Men – same style , no colors
Women — unique style; all colors
Obviously these rules say something about gender, but what? That women have nothing better to do than to spend their time shopping for one-of-a-kind clothes while men are so busy they don’t have time to think about the matter? But that doesn’t explain the analogous pattern in names. Women don’t want themselves or their daughters to have names that are too common, and fashions in names for women, just like fashions in clothing, change much more rapidly than do men’s (to check name popularity, go here).
Why don’t we feel the same way about the names and clothes that men wear? The men-in-black requirement is especially interesting, at least to me. Once, to a friend’s wedding, I wore a deep blue dinner jacket instead of a tux, and I’m not sure if the family has ever forgiven me. Hey, it was summer in the 70s.
It wasn’t always like this. Go back two centuries or so, to the court of King George III rather than Bush George the Second, and you might think you’d stumbled into an Elton John
theme party. Of course, even in the 18th century, women’s dress had greater variety than did men’s, but at least a guy could wear color. In this picture, which makes fun of the difficulties women encountered just to get into their gowns, the man is in bright red, and the maid (?) is in blue. (I'm not sure if the neutral-colored garment being laced up is the final layer or merely an undergarment.)The rules of formal dress, just like preferences in names, probably also vary by social class and (at least in the US) race. Levitt and Dubner, the Freakanomics guys, maintain that changes in names (at least among whites in the US) filter down through the social class structure, starting from the top. What about fashions?
Recycling
December 8, 2006
posted by Jay Livingston
If you blog about the news, things keep cycling back. This week, thanks to the report of the Iraq Study Group, the news reminds us that the Bush administration still refuses to talk with Iran and Syria. (You can download a .pdf file of the report here.) I blogged that such a refusal seemed silly (“Can We Talk?”, Nov. 1). The ISG puts it more soberly: it’s detrimental to us. It quotes an Iraqi official saying that already “Iran is negotiating with the US on the streets of Baghdad,” (p. 25 of the .pdf file, probably p. 33 in the actual report).
And then there’s the controversy over just how much violence there is. Two months ago, the British journal The Lancet published an article estimating that 600,000 people had been killed in Iraq, twenty times the figure President Bush had mentioned.
The numbers obviously had political implications, and war supporters (yes, there still were some back in October) insisted that the numbers were greatly inflated. After all it worked 470 a day, when even the big massacres reported on the news— car bombings and the like— rarely killed more than fifty. Some social scientists and anti-war bloggers defended the research— its sampling technique and its conclusions.
Shaping the data to fit political goals seems to have been a tool more used by the administration than by the social scientists. The ISG has this to say (p. 62 in the .pdf file).
posted by Jay Livingston
If you blog about the news, things keep cycling back. This week, thanks to the report of the Iraq Study Group, the news reminds us that the Bush administration still refuses to talk with Iran and Syria. (You can download a .pdf file of the report here.) I blogged that such a refusal seemed silly (“Can We Talk?”, Nov. 1). The ISG puts it more soberly: it’s detrimental to us. It quotes an Iraqi official saying that already “Iran is negotiating with the US on the streets of Baghdad,” (p. 25 of the .pdf file, probably p. 33 in the actual report).
And then there’s the controversy over just how much violence there is. Two months ago, the British journal The Lancet published an article estimating that 600,000 people had been killed in Iraq, twenty times the figure President Bush had mentioned.
The numbers obviously had political implications, and war supporters (yes, there still were some back in October) insisted that the numbers were greatly inflated. After all it worked 470 a day, when even the big massacres reported on the news— car bombings and the like— rarely killed more than fifty. Some social scientists and anti-war bloggers defended the research— its sampling technique and its conclusions.
Shaping the data to fit political goals seems to have been a tool more used by the administration than by the social scientists. The ISG has this to say (p. 62 in the .pdf file).
In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases. A murder of an Iraq is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.
Rationality at Ralph's?
December 5, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Sociologists are often accused of being preoccupied with the obvious and the useless. Business school faculty, by contrast, work on problems that have a practical payoff, right?
Somehow I got an the e-mailing list for a publication from the Wharton School of Business, which is to MBAs what MIT is to engineers. The latest issue has this article: “The ‘Traveling Salesman’ Goes Shopping: The Efficiency of Purchasing Patterns in the Grocery Store.” It asks if grocery shoppers plan out their route through the supermarket the way that sales reps plan a multi-city trip. “Do shoppers tend to be somewhat ‘optimal’ in their shopping patterns?”
And it reaches the jaw-dropping conclusion: “travel inefficiency accounts for a large portion of the travel distance in the majority of grocery trips.”
I’ve shopped in supermarkets, and I’ve tagged along with others who shop in supermarkets. So this research seems right up there with “Ursine Defecation Patterns and Their Correlation with Sylvan Density Environmental Variables.” In a word, du-uhh.
The grocery researchers put Lojack-like transmitters on shopping carts so as to generate something like that map in Harry Potter with moving dots tracking people as they scamper around Hogwarts. Then the researchers matched the shopper’s path with the items scanned at the checkout. It’s an interesting high-tech “unobtrusive measure.” Without the shopper’s knowledge (I assume), they could know what items she bought and the route she took through the store. They also knew where those items were on the shelves, so they could work out the “ideal” route and compare it to the shopper’s actual route.
The high-tech research confirms what most of us could have guessed from our own experience, though it gives more precise estimates: Shoppers “spend only 20% to 30% of their time actually acquiring merchandise.”
O.K. People are not going from peanut butter to milk to ground chuck with tunnel-vision efficiency. (There’s a mid-Atlantic chain called ShopRite, and when I first saw that name I thought: exactly — shopping as ritual. And as Durkheim reminded us long ago, rituals are not about rationality and efficiency.)
But if people spend only 30% of their time actually “shopping,” what are they doing the other 70% of the time?
Most likely, they’re looking. As they’d probably tell you, they’re looking at all the stuff — that’s why companies spend so much on packaging and why they compete so desperately for eye-level locations on the shelves. But my guess is that shoppers also spend a fair amount of time looking at
the other shoppers. And that is something they would probably not tell you.
I don’t mean that people would deliberately lie about what they are doing. It’s just that they are not aware of it, and more important, nobody thinks of people-watching as part of shopping. If you asked me what I did at the ShopRite, it just wouldn’t occur to me to say that I saw a lot of different people.
If only there were an unobtrusive Lojack that could monitor not just where shoppers are pushing their carts but what they are looking at. Failing that, we might see if shoppers traveled more efficiently when the store was relatively empty and there was nobody to look at. Or maybe some clever students who still need an idea for a research project could figure out some other way.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Sociologists are often accused of being preoccupied with the obvious and the useless. Business school faculty, by contrast, work on problems that have a practical payoff, right?
Somehow I got an the e-mailing list for a publication from the Wharton School of Business, which is to MBAs what MIT is to engineers. The latest issue has this article: “The ‘Traveling Salesman’ Goes Shopping: The Efficiency of Purchasing Patterns in the Grocery Store.” It asks if grocery shoppers plan out their route through the supermarket the way that sales reps plan a multi-city trip. “Do shoppers tend to be somewhat ‘optimal’ in their shopping patterns?”
And it reaches the jaw-dropping conclusion: “travel inefficiency accounts for a large portion of the travel distance in the majority of grocery trips.”I’ve shopped in supermarkets, and I’ve tagged along with others who shop in supermarkets. So this research seems right up there with “Ursine Defecation Patterns and Their Correlation with Sylvan Density Environmental Variables.” In a word, du-uhh.
The grocery researchers put Lojack-like transmitters on shopping carts so as to generate something like that map in Harry Potter with moving dots tracking people as they scamper around Hogwarts. Then the researchers matched the shopper’s path with the items scanned at the checkout. It’s an interesting high-tech “unobtrusive measure.” Without the shopper’s knowledge (I assume), they could know what items she bought and the route she took through the store. They also knew where those items were on the shelves, so they could work out the “ideal” route and compare it to the shopper’s actual route.
The high-tech research confirms what most of us could have guessed from our own experience, though it gives more precise estimates: Shoppers “spend only 20% to 30% of their time actually acquiring merchandise.”
O.K. People are not going from peanut butter to milk to ground chuck with tunnel-vision efficiency. (There’s a mid-Atlantic chain called ShopRite, and when I first saw that name I thought: exactly — shopping as ritual. And as Durkheim reminded us long ago, rituals are not about rationality and efficiency.)
But if people spend only 30% of their time actually “shopping,” what are they doing the other 70% of the time?
Most likely, they’re looking. As they’d probably tell you, they’re looking at all the stuff — that’s why companies spend so much on packaging and why they compete so desperately for eye-level locations on the shelves. But my guess is that shoppers also spend a fair amount of time looking at
the other shoppers. And that is something they would probably not tell you.I don’t mean that people would deliberately lie about what they are doing. It’s just that they are not aware of it, and more important, nobody thinks of people-watching as part of shopping. If you asked me what I did at the ShopRite, it just wouldn’t occur to me to say that I saw a lot of different people.
If only there were an unobtrusive Lojack that could monitor not just where shoppers are pushing their carts but what they are looking at. Failing that, we might see if shoppers traveled more efficiently when the store was relatively empty and there was nobody to look at. Or maybe some clever students who still need an idea for a research project could figure out some other way.
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