Purity and Danger on the Campaign Trail

June 3, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

Mary Douglas, in some of her later writing after Purity and Danger, noted that some cultures are more rigid about the categories they use to think about things in their world; other cultures accepted a degree of fuzziness and ambiguity.

American politicians have often found success in appealing to the more rigid world view. They call for a hardening of boundaries — geographic, moral, and cognitive. It is the view that divides the world into good and evil. The most famous example in recent history is George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” State of the Union speech in 2002. Referring to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, Bush declared, “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

The “axis powers” of World War II , the basis of Bush’s phrase, were in fact linked by alliance. The countries in Bush’s axis of evil had no such alliance, and two of them, Iraq and Iran, had just fought each other in a devastating nine-year war. Bush was trying to build support for the invasion of Iraq as a response to the terrorist attack of 9/11. So even though the 9/11 terrorists had nothing to do with Saddam’s Iraq, Bush could lump them all together as “evil.” This reduction of the world into two simple categories, good and evil, worked. Nearly half of all Americans believed that Saddam had been behind 9/11, and of course nobody in the Bush administration did anything to disabuse them of that mistaken idea. Bush was able to sell the invasion of Iraq as part of the war on terror (he might just as well have said “war on evil”) — sell it to America, that is.  But while Bush was successful in the US, the rest of the world rejected his logic, his “facts,” his policy, and quite possibly his good-vs.-evil world view.

You would have thought that the experience of Iraq had taught us something. In the movies, when you get rid of the evil ruler, all the Munchkins hail you as a savior, send you back to Kansas, and live forever in happiness and peace. But in the real world, Iraq turned out to be a much more complicated array of political, religious, and ethnic alliances than merely good and evil. Even if Saddam was evil, getting rid of him did not exactly unleash the forces of good, as the daily press reports from Iraq remind us. The world of international politics is more complicated than good and evil, and the country that has benefited most from our wars against evil in Afghanistan and Iraq has been that axis-of-evil linchpin Iran.

Nevertheless, here is Fred Thompson, former senator and now probably a candidate for president: “This is a battle between the forces of civilization and the forces of evil and we've got to choose sides.”

Thompson has not even officially declared his candidacy for President, but in the polls, he’s already ranked third among Republicans. If Mary Douglas is right, we should also see this Purity-and-Danger view underlying the position of Thompson and his supporters on the subject of immigration: Harden the boundaries, wall off the borders, keep out the dangers of impurity.

Stay tuned.

Movin’ on up?

June 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I was in my thirties, it occurred to me that I was not earning nearly as much as my father had when he was my age. He had been, for much of his life, a successful businessman; I was an academic. Even in absolute dollars, his income thirty years earlier (he was about thirty years older than me) may have been higher than mine. Certainly in inflation-adjusted dollars, he had been much better off.

I was an example of “downward mobility,” something I’d almost never heard about, not even in my sociology classes. The phrase “social mobility” almost always carries an assumption that we move in only one direction – up. There’s a silent “upward” in front of the “social mobility.” We expect that children will do better or go farther than their parents did.

This expectation runs into a logical problem. If the pie remains the same size, and some people get a larger slice, others have to get a smaller slice. The only way for everyone’s slice to increase is if the pie is constantly getting larger. Or as President Reagan famously said, a rising tide lifts all boats. The pie metaphor works better, for what has happened in the last few decades is that the pie has gotten larger, but the slices for most of us have grown by a few bites while the slices of the wealthy, already large, have been supersized.

The middle class is slipping farther and farther behind the wealthy (and much farther behind the very wealthy). But beyond that, the last few years have also brought more downward mobility. (At least in this one area, I was way ahead of the curve.) On average, men in their 30s have not been doing as well as their parents at a similar age. The report by Isabel Sawhill and John Morton, mentioned in the previous post in this blog, compared the incomes of thirtysomethings a generation apart. Here are the results.

The men in their thirties in 1994 were earning just barely more than were men of their parents’ generation. But men in their thirties in 2004 were doing worse, and by a considerable amount – $35,000 compared with $40,200 for their fathers.

The good news is that despite this trend, family incomes in both periods were up.

The increase is not as great for today’s thirtysomethings as it was for those even ten years ago, but the trend is still up. What does it all mean – men’s incomes down, family incomes up? The obvious answer is that more women are working. Some women in their thirties have chosen to be in the paid labor force for reasons of career and self-fulfillment. But my guess is that most of these women are working because they have to – because the additional income they bring in is the only thing that allows their family to maintain middle-class status.

In earlier generations, American families had the luxury of being able to live on a single income. Now, a second or even third income in the family has become a necessity.

The American Dream

May 31, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social stratification has two important dimensions: inequality and mobility. How wide are the gaps between people in the society, and how easy is it to move up the economic ladder?

It’s clear that the gap between rich and poor has been growing. So has the gap between the rich and the middle. Those at the top of the income distribution have been getting a larger and larger slice of the total pie. In the last 30 years, average real income has risen moderately, but incomes for the top 1% have nearly tripled. The typical CEO in 1978 got about 40 times what the average worker earned. Today, he makes 260 times as much. European countries have a seen a similar trend, though it is far more muted. Among the OECD countries, when it comes to inequality, we’re number one.

But even if inequality is greater in the US than in other industrialized countries, America is still the land of opportunity, the country where people are freest and most able to work their way up the ladder of success, right?

Certainly this is what Americans believe. Isabel Sawhill and John Morton have just published a short, non-technical, and very understandable report: “Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?”

The dream is certainly alive, as this chart from the report shows.


In comparisons with people in other countries, Americans are the least troubled by economic inequality in their society. They are also most likely to believe in the idea of economic mobility — to think that economic success should and does depend on individual effort rather than social forces, and that the government should not try to reduce inequality. It’s the belief expressed succinctly in a bumper sticker, “I fight poverty, I work.”

But is the American dream reflected in reality? Or is George Carlin right when he says, “The reason they call it the American dream is that you have to be asleep to believe in it”?

Sawhill and Morton looked at “intergenerational mobility”— the income of thirtysomethings today compared with their parents’ income at a similar age. Of the countries they measured, the US comes out at the low end.


Germany has 1.5 times as much mobility as the US, and Denmark has three times as much. Only Great Britain has less mobility than does the US.

It looks as though the American Dream is alive and well . . . and living in Denmark.

American Nostalgia

May 28, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“American Graffiti” was on the other night, and I watched some of it in company with the teenager in residence. We didn’t watch the whole thing. We didn’t need to. The movie is pure nostalgia – the sounds and sights of another time – and once we soaked up enough of that, we lost interest. You don’t watch George Lucas films for character and dialogue.

I was sitting there singing along with the oldies. Occasionally, I would offer an astute cinematic comment like, “The fifty-eight Impala, what a car.” But later as we were talking about it, my son wondered what sorts of things from today would trigger the same kinds of response forty or fifty years from now. “Will we look at a movie and say, ‘Wow, a 2007 Accord!”? He didn’t think so.  He didn’t even think the music of today would have the same kind of meaning for his generation that those early rock songs have.

It wasn’t that he thought those old songs were better. (He dismissed “Sixteen Candles,” one of the first songs on the soundtrack, as sounding exactly like “Earth Angel,” which for some reason we’d heard earlier that day. And I really couldn’t argue.) But what makes “Sixteen Candles” so powerful, so evocative of an era, may be that the source of music then was much more centralized. In the 50s and 60s, a city would have only a handful of AM radio stations, most of them playing the same top-40 list. Youth today have a much greater variety of music, and they have become a much more fragmented public. For its grand finale this year,  “American Idol,” rather than use the hits of today, turned the clock back to “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” an album from forty years ago, long before any of the contestants was born.

As for cars, they are still a crucial part of American culture, but standout individual models are rare. SUVs look pretty much alike, as do sedans. More tellingly, cars may have lost their symbolic value as markers of identity.

So what objects might my son, forty years hence, point out in a period film? “Hey look, an iMac. Remember when Apple called all their products iThis and iThat?” He was right. The iPod might well be the equivalent of the those doo-wop songs. But the emblematic object is the medium (the iPod), not the message (the various songs it plays). Or if we are looking for specific items, we might do better in the electronics department than at the car lot. Movies (or whatever storytelling medium we will have in 2050) might evoke the world of 2007 with an X-box and Halo, a Play Station and Grand Theft Auto.

Billy Collins has a poem “Nostalgia.” The joke of it (its “conceit,” as English professors might say) is that nostalgia is limited to the relatively short span of our own lives. It begins:

Remember the 1340’s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.

Collins might have added that nostalgia extends in one direction only — backwards, towards the “old days.” When we picture those people in the 1340s, or when we see films of those people of the 1920s walking stiffly about in black-and-white at four frames per second in their narrow suits and bowler hats; it’s hard to realize that to those people, their times were not the old days, and they themselves were not old-fashioned. They were at the cutting edge, the height of modernity.

In the same way, it’s hard to think that from the perspective of the future, our lives today are old-fashioned, and in only a few decades we’ll chuckle nostalgically to see people thumbing their Blackberries or watching downloads of “Pirates of the Caribbean” on their cell phones.