Durkheim With a Rim Shot

August 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

In his comment on yesterday’s blog post here, Jeremy Freese mentioned Robert Frank’s new book Falling Behind and its consideration of the general economic importance of relative deprivation. The Times reviewed that book Sunday along with another book by Frank, The Economic Naturalist.

This second book is the outcome of an assignment Frank gives his students: “pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed.” The reviewer (Daniel Gross) provides a couple of examples.

Frank’s students, with a writing assist from their professor, explain why a $20,000 car rents for $40 a day but a $500 tuxedo rents for $90 a day. (Among other things, it has to do with the need for tuxedo shops to maintain a large inventory of different sizes.) Or why fast-food restaurants promise a free meal if customers don’t get a receipt. (It’s to deter theft by cashiers.)

The review doesn’t say which classes was Frank using. Was it freshman econ? Or was it the graduate seminar?

But I wonder if something similar might work in sociology. I wouldn’t even require that students provide answers. I just want them to step back and stop taking the world for granted. In fact, it’s always seemed to me that some of the best sociologists are like stand-up comedians – the “observational” comics who point out some not-quite-rational fact that we’ve all seen but haven’t really noticed. “What were they doing with a car on the moon? . . . There is no more male idea in the history of the universe than ‘Why don’t we fly up to the moon and drive around.’” That’s Seinfeld. But there are other examples.

And this thing with the number of suicides staying pretty much the same year in year out, what’s up with that? I mean, it can’t be the same thirty thousand Americans killing themselves each year.

Or did you ever notice that with some of these real tight-ass religious types? They work so damn hard, they gotta wind up making some money, and then they don’t know how to kick back and enjoy it. What’s that all about? You’ve got the money. Spend it. Of course, in Italy it’s just the opposite. You work a little extra there, they make you feel guilty. They’re like, “Uh-oh, here comes the Protestant.”

But seriously folks... The above are macro-level phenomena not so visible in everyday life. I expect that students will choose more micro-level puzzles not based on differences in rates. But what specific questions would we get with this assignment. Only one way to find out.

I guess it’s time to revise the syllabus.

Another $10 Million Nobody

August 6, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Gary Kremen is the founder of Match.com. He’s 43 years old and worth about $10 million. If it were you, you might think you’d slack off, take it easy, and enjoy the life your money can buy. But Kremen, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times, “logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because, he said, he does not think he has nearly enough money to ease up.” That’s the way it is in Silicon Valley. 

“You’re nobody here at $10 million,” Mr. Kremen said earnestly over a glass of pinot noir at an upscale wine bar here.

Kremen is typical of millionaires in the area and probably elsewhere. They are not the richest of the rich – they are merely “single-digit millionaires” – and they put it long hours in order to get richer. “Working class millionaires,” the Times calls them.
It seems as though no amount is ever enough. The article quotes another 70-hours-a-week millionaire: “Here, the top 1 percent chases the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and the top one-tenth of 1 percent chases the top one-one-hundredth of 1 percent.” It’s “a marathon with no finish line.” But why do they keep running?
Nearly forty years ago, Samuel Stouffer coined the term “relative deprivation” to account for those who objectively had more than most others yet felt dissatisfied. (Stouffer was looking not at income but at promotions in the military, but the same principle was at work.) No matter how much you have, if you compare yourself with others who have more, you’re going to feel deprived. It’s just one more way in which people are not rational about money.
But it’s nothing new, at least not in America. Here’s deTocqueville, writing in 1836:

In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures. . . .there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.

Who were the 1830s was counterparts of the dot.com millionaire, and what were the counterparts of the expensive cars, houses, planes, etc. they want more of? Whatever they might have been, deTocqueville saw the endless marathon:

Besides the good things that he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others that death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps his mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to change his plans and his abode.

Sports Psych - Junior Edition

August 5, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

I remember my social studies teachers in high school having a difficult time when communist countries like the Soviet Union or China would do well in the Olympics. For some reason, they thought – and wanted us to think – that bad systems had to be bad in every respect. And if an evil country did produce medal winners, it must have used evil methods to do so.

So my teachers told us horror stories about the government selecting kids who showed some talent in a sport, shipping them off to special training centers – high-pressure environments for turning kids into professional athletes. (The US media are still pushing this image, at least as regards China. ) Yes, the system may produce Olympic medals, but the cost is heavy – the loss of childhood and untold psychological damage.

Thank goodness we didn’t live in such a system.

This morning, the New York Times has an article about sports psychologists treating young athletes. How young? Some of them still count their age in single digits.

The idea that mental coaching can help the youngest athletes has pervaded the upper reaches of the country’s zealous youth sports culture. . . . The families of young athletes routinely pay for personal strength coaches, conditioning coaches, specialized skill coaches, . . . nutritionists and recruiting consultants. Now, the personal sports psychologist has joined the entourage.

I was especially startled by this quote from one of these psychologists: “The parents have the right intentions. They want their kid to be the next Tiger Woods.” Deciding that your child, as young as eight or nine, will have a career as a professional athlete, choosing the particular sport, and bringing in psychologists when the kid can’t take the pressure – that’s the right intentions?

As I was reading this, I remembered the cautionary tales my teachers told me decades ago about the Soviets and the Chinese. The difference between them and us apparently is that in the US, the role of the state is being played by the parents. If the state brings all its force and resources into turning a child into a top-notch athlete, that’s bad. If parents do so, that’s good.

Samaritans - II

August 2, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s an early scene in the 1969 movie “Midnight Cowboy.” Joe Buck, just arrived in New York from Texas, is walking up Fifth Avenue and sees a man obviously in need of help lying unconscious on the sidewalk outside Tiffany’s. He starts towards the man, but then notices all the other people walking past as though the man either didn’t exist or didn’t need help. And then, taking his cue from the others, he continues on his way, though with a worried glance back at the man on the sidewalk.

It’s a perfect example of bystander apathy, the topic of the previous blog posting. My point was that bystander apathy arises not from bad individual character traits but from normal social processes: faced with unfamiliar circumstances, we look to others for a definition of the situation. What do we do when something seems unusual but everyone else regards it as normal? (This was a standard set-up for countless episodes of “Candid Camera.”) We may feel uncomfortable, but we’d also feel uncomfortable going against what appears to be the norm.

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni also blogged about the Wichita incident. To his credit, Etzioni doesn’t take the “what’s wrong with people today?” line. He is well aware that if you want to change the amount of some behavior, you don’t get very far by trying to change people’s character. You’re much better off trying to change the situational circumstances.

Etzioni recommends that the US adopt “Good Samaritan” laws (also called “duty to assist” laws) that allow for the prosecution of people who fail to provide reasonable assistance. He acknowledges the difficulties of enforcement (what is “reasonable”?), and he doesn’t try to refute the argument that such laws would have no effect on behavior. Remember those seminarians who saw a man in need of help while they were en route to give a talk about the good Samaritan? (If you don't remember, see the previous entry in this blog.) They were no more likely to help than were others. So it’s doubtful that a law passed by some distant legislature would have had any impact on those people in the Wichita convenience store.

So Etzioni focuses instead on the symbolic function of the law.

Above all, laws have an expressive function. They are one way in which we state what our moral expectations are. They are of special value when, in a growing and complex society, it is unclear what we as a community consider right and wrong.

In other words, the law will make us feel better – it will confirm that our view of right and wrong is the official view. It won’t make us act better.

This is not to say that norms don’t change. “Midnight Cowboy” was originally rated X. (It's the only X-rated film ever to win the Oscar for best picture.) Yet it has almost no nudity, and little profanity (Ratso's “fuckin’ creeps” is the only time the “f-word” is heard), and the MPAA has since downgraded the X to an R, testimony that there has been a change in norms regarding the presentation of hustling, straight and gay.