Thinking and Working

July 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Early in my teaching career, I was talking casually after class one day with a student. “What are you, some kind of intellectual?” he asked, more challenging than curious.

Well yes, I thought. Isn’t that a legitimate thing to be at an institution of higher learning? I had not yet gotten used to the very practical orientation most of my students had towards their education. They weren’t interested in ideas as such. They wanted to learn stuff that would allow them to get better jobs and make more money.

I was reminded of this again by a front page story in Sunday’s New York Times. “Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.” So said France’s new finance minister recently.
France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was elected on a platform of more work for the French people, who by law have 30 paid vacation days and one paid holiday each year. (The US, by contrast, has no law requiring employers to give workers even one paid vacation day. See my earlier blog post.) Apparently, M. Sarkozy’s government sees thinking as antithetical to working, and they are trying to change a long-standing French view about abstract thought.

It may be hard for those of us in the US to appreciate the status that thinking and ideas have in France. Intellectuals and philosophers become famous there – a line that goes from Descartes through Sartre to today’s Bernard-Henry Lévy, a name virtually unknown here but so familiar in France that he’s known by his initials, BHL. Sort of like ARod and JLo.

Intellectuals appear regularly on French TV and are allowed to speak at length, not the three-and-a-half minute interview or crossfire shouting match that passes for discussion on the US airwaves. We Americans want our answers short and, if not sweet, at least easy to grasp and to use. We are generally suspicious of intellectuals and of abstract ideas. Our orientation has always been more pragmatic.

Things haven’t changed much since deTocqueville, 170 years ago, opened Book II of Democracy in America with this:

Chapter I     PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD OF THE AMERICANS     I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States. The Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided, the very names of which are scarcely known to them.

A few chapters later, “The Americans show a less decided taste for general ideas than the French. This is especially true in politics.”
DeTocquville attributes this disdain for abstract ideas to democracy, equality, and individualism. In an egalitarian society, where nobody is better than anyone else, each person relies on himself and winds up being able to manage very well, thank you. So if a person’s ideas are sufficient for his own life, what need does he have of other ideas?

As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of their understanding.

This orientation also leads to a focus on the concrete and a vague suspicion of abstractions, especially those that have no practical application

They like to discern the object which engages their attention with extreme clearness . . . . This disposition of mind soon leads them to condemn forms, which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed between them and the truth.

But the French are more concerned with ideas and the logical connections among those ideas. Americans might reject a line of thought because it leads to nothing useful. The French might reject it if it is pas logique. Americans, on the other hand, are much more concerned with concrete facts.

Adam Gopnik, a journalist who lived in Paris for a while, describes his difficulties in France when he had to “fact check” an article. Fact-checking is standard procedure in American magazines: you call people mentioned in the article to make sure that the facts – dates, quotations, etc. – are correct. The French had never heard of such a thing (“What do you mean, une fact checker?”) and were suspicious when Gopnik explained.

Dubious look; there is More Here Than Meets the Eye. . . .There is a certainty in France that what assumes the guise of transparent positivism, “fact checking,” is in fact a complicated plot of one kind or another, a way of enforcing ideological coherence. That there might really be facts worth checking is an obvious and annoying absurdity; it would be naive to think otherwise. I was baffled and exasperated by this until it occurred to me that you would get exactly the same incomprehension and suspicion if you told American intellectuals and politicians, post-interview, . . . . “In a couple of weeks a theory checker will be in touch with you.” Alarmed, suspicious: “A what?” “You know, a theory checker. Just someone to make sure that all your premises agreed with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.” . . . A theory checker? What an absurd waste of time, since it’s apparent (to us Americans) that people don’t speak in theories, that the theories they employ change, flexibly, and of necessity, from moment to moment in conversation, that the notion of limiting conversation to a rigid rule of theoretical constancy is an absurd denial of what conversation is. (pp. 95-96)

Well, replace fact (and factual) for theory in that last sentence, and you have the common French view of fact checking.

Apparently President Sarkozy has his work cut out for him.

Music? At a concert?

July 21, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

We went to the Philharmonic concert one evening this week on the Great Lawn in Central Park. People come early, meet friends, spread blankets, put out all sorts of food. Most find the others in their group either by cell phone (“I see you now. Turn about a quarter-turn. I’m waving”). Some had more striking visual techniques, like waving the Turkish flag.


And when the concert starts, they listen to the music. Or not.

As a sociologist, I should have remembered that music is only one of the reasons that people go to a concert, especially a free, outdoor concert. I also should have realized that there’s a strong correlation between how interested people are in the music and how far they are from the stage.


In the diagram, the X marks where we were, nearly 200 yards from the stage, and the crowd stretched back to the farthest reaches of the Lawn. (You can get some idea of distances by using the baseball diamonds. The blue lines indicate emergency lanes the Park establishes – nobody’s allowed to sit there – that divide the area into quadrants.)

I know that the demographic for classical music tilts heavily towards the geezer end of the scale, but around us were thirtysomethings, people who in an earlier decade would have been called “yuppies.” And they never stopped talking, to one another or on their cell phones. Even when the music began, and all through the concert, they didn’t even lower their voices. I heard about baby sitters and hedge funds and the Yankees’ pitching rotation. I heard conversations I didn’t understand because they were in Italian or Turkish.

It was clear that almost nobody at this remove from the stage was listening to the music at all, even though the orchestra had selected “pops” pieces that might be familiar (“Til Eulenspiegel” “Pictures at an Exhibition”). But I would bet that if you asked them, “What did you do last night?” a lot of them would say, “We went to the concert in Central Park.”

Why would people come to a concert if they were going to completely ignore the music? They could picnic in the park any time. I speculated that there must be some attraction to doing something that many other people are doing. The presence of lots of other people makes the same activity more pleasant, more social.

One other reason became obvious at the end of the concert.



Still, I doubt that most of the people there knew about the fireworks in advance, and I’d guess that most of them would have come even without the fireworks.

Full disclosure: I could not get my own shot of the fireworks to print, and I grabbed this image off the Web. It looks much better than mine.

Draw-a-line Contest

July 17, 2007Posted by Jay Livingston

My previous post was about methodological dishonesty. Here we go again.

A line is a convenient way of illustrating the relation between variables, a quick way to make sense of the trend in an array of points. Here’s a graph showing two variables – the percent of income that corporations supposedly pay (X-axis) and the percent of GDP accounted for by taxes.

Your assignment is to draw a line that shows the relation between these to variables. (Try doing it before you scroll down to see my solution.)



Here’s what I got.



The line is not quite straight – I used Paint, and I haven’t figured out how to draw a straight line – but you get the idea. The higher the tax rate, the more money for the government. That’s only common sense. And the graph seems to show that it holds true even when that money is figured as a proportion of GDP.

If these data points were hours of study time and GPA, we’d conclude that studying generally raises your GPA.

Norway is an “outlier” and we’d need to take a closer look at it to figure out why its tax revenues are so much higher, relative to GDP, than are those in countries with similar corporate tax rates. (If this were studying and GPA, we’d probably conclude that Norway must be unusually smart.)

But that’s not how conservative economists want things to work. They believe in something called the Laffer curve. It’s based on the idea that if you raise taxes too much, people and corporations will be discouraged and not bother working. For example, if the government taxed 100% of your income, would you work? Of course not, and the government would get no taxes from you.

Conversely, if you lower taxes, revenue will actually go up because people will work more, make more money, and even though the percentage paid is lower, the total amount paid will be higher. Twenty percent of $100,000 is more than 30% of $50,000.

When the Cheney-Bush administration proposed huge tax cuts back in 2001, some people thought the loss of tax revenue would erase the surpluses built up in the Clinton years and create a deficit. But the conservatives hauled out the Laffer-curve theory to counter these arguments. Of course they were wrong. The tax cuts quickly wiped out the surplus and ran up huge deficits.

So what’s a Laffer believer like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to do with this array of points? Look at the line they draw to illustrate the relation between tax rates and revenue.


Now Norway, instead of being an outlier, is the point that best allows the Journal to draw the Laffer curve. It's a bit of a stretch, much like travelling from the United Arab Emirates to France by going through Norway

Usually, we try to draw a line so that it minimizes the distance of points from the line. The Wall Street Journal line maximizes the distances. Seems like a good idea, doesn't it. If you studied a fair amount and still wanted to improve your GPA, I guess the Journal would suggest cutting down on book time. Let’s party.

Hat tip: Several other bloggers have picked up on this bit of nonsense. Kieran Healy, in his own commentary, links to several of them

Conclusions First, Then the Research

July 15, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sometimes in class, I’ll ask students how they might find get information on some sociological question. “Do a survey,” is the frequent answer. Students seem to think that a survey, any survey, has magical powers to reveal the truth.

“A survey is just asking a bunch of people a bunch of questions,” I usually say. “Who are you going to ask, and what are you going to ask them?” In other words, the validity of a survey depends on the quality of the sample and the quality of the questions.

Michael Schwartz, when he was a grad student TA for the methods course, would give students an assignment intended to tarnish the objectivity-mystique of surveys: : “Design a questionnaire to show that . . .” Conclusion first, then the research. Mike’s point was that the questions – the order in which they are asked, the phrasing, etc. – can bias the results. I think part two of the assignment was to design a second questionnaire that would yield a result directly opposite to the first.

It was all in good, educational fun, I thought. Real researchers would never deliberately do something like that. But today, Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community gives some examples of result-oriented questions from Zogby polls. Zogby is a pretty good source on political questions, especially their surveys of international populations. So it was sobering to see these polls custom-tailored to produce the results wanted by the people who were paying for the survey.

Here’s an example for a poll Zogby did for Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group that gets a lot of its money from the Clinton-hating Scaife foundation.

Some people believe that the Bill Clinton administration was corrupt. Whether or not you believe the Clinton administration was corrupt, how concerned are you that there will be high levels of corruption in the White House if Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2008?

I think that the Sociology department at Montclair will rewrite some of the items in our teacher evaluation forms.

Some students in this professor’s other courses have said that this instructor is one of the best in the university. Regardless of those other courses, how would you rate the professor’s performance in this course?